As Mal had grown he’d attracted ephemera like a rolling ball of dust that bobbles across the floor of a barbershop. Now at the side of his bed there are machines that help him breath, machines that help him wash, machines that help him eat, machines that help him excrete. Necessary decorations.
And then there are creams and medicines. Lotions to rub on his sores and serums to massage into his skin, all of which Mum did on her own. The latter years of her life were effectively spent basting an enormous turkey in the oven, lifting it, turning it and coating its flesh without the reward of a hearty meal.
She refused to allow others in to assist, and so the list of things on the wall, the list of the chores, the tasks, the things that needed to be done so long as someone’s concern was keeping Mal alive, was hers and hers alone to work through.
Feed him.
Wash him.
Change his bag.
Her hands were withered and gnarled, as frail as rice paper but soft and kind and older than she was.
Check his breathing.
Rub his skin.
Change his bag again.
Her hair, once tight and curly, was just wire now, white and unloved. It was the spectre of the hair that had been there before.
Shave him.
Kiss him.
Don’t cry in front of him.
She was a woman empty, weakened with the weight of a son on her shoulders. Her son Malcolm, the fattest man in the world.
21
Mal is still sleeping as the medics run tests. When it seems as though he’s stopped, he starts again. The churn of his gut inflates his lungs. Snore growl repeat. Sound as oppression. The army wringing confessions from confused prisoners of war. White noise. I saw it on television once but it had more charm.
Mum is usually in by now, meddling with the curtains so that the sun doesn’t lay its rays across Mal’s eyes, but not today. I’ve nothing to do but look at him.
His arms are thicker than my legs. Four times as thick. Five or six, maybe. They look like rolled ham. Mal sheds skin, snake-like, with every move. Each morning he nests upon a fresh coat of it. His fingernails are thick, cracked, yellow and shiny like laminated lumps of cheese. His huge torso is contoured with stretchmarks the length and thickness of a cowboy’s leather belt. I imagine them tearing.
The folds in his flesh roll over and over like the dunes in a desert. This is my landscape. The nurse who came once to teach us how to use the machinery to dry the sweat from Mal’s skin and prevent the irritation that made him feel as though he was being sanded told me a story about a morbidly obese woman from Wales. When she died of a heart attack at seventy-eight stone, forty-five years of age, they found the television remote control lost deep underneath her left breast. I liked the thought of the volume rising and falling as she breathed, of the confusion as the screen went blank whenever she found something funny.
I dread to think what’s hidden deep inside Mal’s crevices. Small animals pulled into the quicksand of his bulk.
22
Considering that the chance of him getting hit by a bus, falling from a cliff or being randomly attacked on a late-night train is obliterated by his inability to leave the house, there is a surprisingly large number of ways for a hundred-stone man to die. I listen to the medics explain them again.
Obesity such as Mal’s, the doctor grimaces, is influenced by genetic, metabolic and environmental factors. Mal is the X on the line-graph that charts where the three circumstances must meet for it to happen at an accelerated rate. Morbid obesity involves more than just a lack of willpower or a sedentary lifestyle.
Morbid obesity. Morbid. No other human condition comes pre-packaged with an introductory sentiment. This is because, technically at least, obesity is self-imposed. It implies that there is an alternative kind of obesity, a jolly obesity perhaps, or a merry obesity. The kind that middle-aged single people with a good sense of humour have for a brief time before they become so huge and therefore unlovable as to be classified as morbid. Whether Mal is morbid or not was difficult to tell. Selfish obesity would probably have been more suitably coined.
The doctor always comes armed with newfangled gels, pastes, pills, supplements and creams. He reels off a checklist of invisible murderers.
Coronary heart disease.
Hypertension.
Type II diabetes mellitus.
Hyperlipidemia.
Degenerative joint disease.
Obstructive sleep apnea . . .
Check check check check check check.
Today’s special from the menu was gastroesophageal reflux disease. Heartburn in most, in Mal it had become an excruciating, angry, fire-breathing dragon. Manifested, it felt as though his heart was having great plumes of black oil smoke blown straight through it, ending only in the temporary reprieve of a hot, grotesque burp.
When he wriggles his bellies ripple like imaginary stones have been skimmed across them. Past him I see the glass stained in crow. I see its carcass smothered across the patio. I see a cat plucking at its entrails with the rabid fluster of a banjo player.
Past that I see the chrome trailer bouncing light back across Mal’s naked girth.
And then, past that, I can see Lou.
Lou.
She’s back.
I blink four or five long, squeezed blinks. I turn my head from side to side. And when I come back to where I’d seen her, she is gone. It is a phantom and a memory and a cruel trick of my mind on my eyes. The picture of me and her is the one I carry, the one that weighs me down. I’ve loved her for such a very long time.
23
All I knew about Mum and Dad before they had children I knew from the stories Mum would tell Mal in bed when we too were young. Sharing a bedroom, we’d listen to her until one or both of us slept. It was soothing. She was womb. They were just snippets of stories but they could be pieced together easily to form some semblance of a history.
Mum met Dad just after he’d finished school. Mum hadn’t been to school for years. Her mother had been ill and her father had fled long before. Mum cared for her mother on a full-time basis, nurse, maid and daughter. Dad was popular. He was good-looking and muscular. Mum had no friends. She’d needed Dad, and he was there at the right time, but he’d come to need her equally. Dad had proposed to Mum just before he left to go and work in South Africa.
‘He missed me terribly whilst he was there, and I likewise. He used to like being at home with me. I used to cook huge meals and we’d sit down together and eat them. I used to care for him. Mother him. When he was away I barely knew what to do with myself. All I had was my mother but she was too ill by this time. Could barely recognise me, poor woman. And it was me that had bathed her since I was small. I would just sit with her in the house, poor woman, and bake and clean and care for her like I always had since for ever. And wait for him to come home. I just wanted to look after him. I’d been caring for my mother for so long, it was all I knew how to do.’
We always stayed still when she spoke.
‘When he came home, he was never really the same again. Poor man.’
Mum would sit with Mal on her knee, a ventriloquist in silhouette. She would reward him for sitting and listening with sweets. He wouldn’t fidget. I’d rattle the bored jittery beat of a letterbox but Mal would be calmed, a hen underneath a dark cloth.
When Dad arrived home, we’d eat until our sides ached and slumber drugged us. Mum would care for us all, and we left behind those times when the length of a day was an indefinable prospect.
In the months after my sporting triumph I’d grown in confidence, testing the warmth of teenage spirit. When Lou and Mal left the house I’d ask her if I could go with them. She always said yes, and I knew from that that she liked my company as much as I craved hers. I couldn’t think of others’. Hers was everything, everything but mine.
Mal’s reluctance to have me follow them around subsided quickly upon her insistence. As the two of them walked hand in hand, like fifteen-year
-olds do, I would trot along behind them like a stray cartoon dog with the scent of sausages, but I’d try and stay closest to Lou, where I felt most welcome. Mal mewed his annoyance. He wasn’t embarrassed to have me with him. What other people thought wasn’t his concern, and he didn’t have any friends he felt any immediate desire to impress. It was more that when I was there, Lou was divided. He didn’t consider me the threat I wished I were, he just didn’t seem to realise how much she loved him already. I did. It felt how it did to be bereaved. To talk to her would alleviate it, so I did as much as possible.
We went to the fair. It was an early autumn evening, and as we walked through the quiet streets the tiny embers of incinerated newspapers brushed our faces and hair. Everything felt quiet and still but the air was brooding, like there was a fight in it somewhere that you could smell on the wind. I walked four paces behind Mal and Lou, just far enough away to still hear the snippets of conversation that were not meant for me.
The fair was erected twice a year in the grounds of the town’s leisure centre. It was a shambles of broken bulbs misspelling the signs on the rides and within minutes the lush green grass turned to a sodden mush chicken-pocked with footprints. Girls with their hair scraped back so violently it threatened to rip their foreheads from their faces. Boys with industrial amounts of product lashing their hair short and neat and only ever forward. Walking amongst them, dressed in whatever rag-tag ensemble he’d dug from the cupboard – sports socks in school shoes, airtight jeans, Dad’s white shirt far too big and a leather jacket that a trendy new sleuth might wear – with the hair and the walk and the girlfriend, Mal looked every bit as ridiculous but at least he hadn’t tried.
‘What are you fucking looking at?’ came a voice.
It was fake anger, you could tell. A bet possibly, or a challenge. But it was being directed at me. It brought that feeling, the rush of feeling you’re in danger, real, physical danger. I sped up to catch Mal but he had stopped and I dared not look behind me. Everything quickened. Mal didn’t speak, he just stood there, looking back over my head. Slowly inflating his chest, proud and peacock. He looked huge, fierce. I peered up at his face but he didn’t acknowledge me, he just stared and stared and stared. I’d done five blinks and looked back down but in that time he’d done none. And the voice behind me was having the gall drained from it.
‘What?!’ it shouted, the same as before but with the power taken out.
Mal’s hand held Lou’s hand and her other hand suddenly held mine. It felt like six years were whipped from the calendar of my age. I turned around slowly.
The voice was that of a boy, maybe my age. He did the beckon of fighting, both hands cupped with come-here fingers. But he looked scared now, and the gaggle of idiots he’d attempted to impress looked toothless and lame. Mal stared. Slowly they dispersed into the lights and the signs and the chances to win things. The flurry of panic slowly subsided, segued into admiration. I looked up at Mal. He didn’t say anything.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Lou.
‘Yes,’ I nodded, trembling.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat, that will make you feel better.’
The two of them held hands as we sat down at a small table, subconsciously dictating the seating plan. My breath was still hurried. I tried to relax as I looked at the menu through a biting stink of fried onions. The fat, smoking man scraping charred bits of meat around the dirty black hotplate with a gardening tool made life itself seem unappetising. We ordered three hotdogs with the ten pounds that Mum had forced into Mal’s hand. Each of us took it in turns to approach the van and slather the cheap meat in almost translucent, possibly toxic tomato ketchup. The bread felt damp and remembered your fingerprints.
‘I don’t know why people bother,’ said Mal.
A warmed knob of butter slipped from his bun and landed with a plop on his knee. He then scooped it up on an expertly hooked finger and dropped it back onto his sausage.
‘Why people bother what?’ said Lou.
‘With the plan.’
‘What plan?’
‘Well . . .’ he considered the question, took another bite and swallowed it down with a deep breath. ‘These people, they’re our age, yet they’re just biding their time until they think it’s acceptable to commence a plan they’ve got figured out for the rest of their lives. They get older and start drinking. They meet someone and get pregnant. They work and work and work. Buy a house and sit in it in silence listening to the baby cry. Have another one to keep it company. Waking up early, going to work, packing a lunch, coming home, watching the television, paying the bills, thinking they’re happy, having another baby just in case. No thanks. And they’re all in such a rush to do it. I mean, look at them.’
I followed the invisible death ray from Mal’s pointed fingertip as he pontificated, then he dropped his hand to Lou’s thigh, where it was before. He gripped it tightly like he always did. He was always holding her in one way or another. Lou looked at Mal and shook her head.
‘That’s called growing up,’ she said.
‘That’s the prize for growing up?’ he said.
‘It’s not a prize, because it’s not a competition. It’s just what people do, Mal.’
‘Yeah, well, there are no winners. Sounds like bullshit to me,’ he said. ‘Why would so many people stick to a plan that hardly ever even seems to work? If all adults were walking around without so much as a worry, or a personal tragedy, or even a shit day in the office, then I might get it. But they’re not. Why would you chase something that turns out to be so fucking awful so much of the time? Looks like a let-down to me.’
After we’d all discarded half a hotdog each, I followed Mal and Lou around the grounds of the fair. I won a cuddly toy I was much too old for by fishing plastic ducks out of a children’s pond. I remembered just how impatient fishing made me, how impatient I could get. I gave the toy to Lou and she said that I was sweet, then kissed me on the cheek, just a little peck, which I got a bit embarrassed about. Next, Mal drew quite a crowd, hitting a large foam pad with an over-sized wooden mallet to ring a bell. The rising strip of light bulbs declared him ‘Superman’ and a small, tinny alarm sounded. People all around us clapped and cheered and whistled, and Mal stepped down from the plinth looking happy again. He won an enormous toy, much bigger than mine, which he gave to Lou and I watched from the corner of my eye as she gave him a kiss to say thank you. I’d have hated to be caught.
As we left, having only been there for half an hour, we walked past the same group we’d encountered as we arrived. They said nothing. The once-brave young soul who’d goaded me shuffled his feet in the mud and looked at the sky. His friends all began to laugh when he accidentally stepped in dog shit.
For the first time I thought I saw Mal, older, something manifesting itself. And for the first time I saw why Lou loved him so much, my eyes opened to it.
24
Dad would be out working more often than not. He would travel the country, visiting elevators, mostly enormous ones meant for no people or lots of people at the same time. Some nights he would be in strange hotels, somewhere else but with the same curtains, the same manufactured darkness in the mornings. He would call and talk to Mum on the phone. She always worried whenever he was away, happier when we were all around her. She would say ‘I hope he’s not sad’, and to think of him sad made me sad. He looked big and old, like an elephant on the plain, its mate taken for her tusks.
On Mum and Dad’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Dad was in. He came in from the bedroom. He was wearing a suit, light grey with a sheen through it, and a metallic coloured stripey tie. His shirt was buttoned right up to the collar so that the girth of his neck filled it and spilled over. The tips of his fingers were reddened where he’d been flustering over the cufflinks before asking Mum to deal with them for him. His trousers were too tight and his hair was combed back with water so that when it dried it naturally bounced into a wiry quiff, offset on either side by
the first footprints of male-pattern baldness. He looked smart, I’d never seen him in a suit before.
‘Tell your mother I’ve gone to start the car,’ he said.
Mum was wearing make-up, purposeful and neat. Her cheeks, decked in blusher, were the kind of rose-pink you see on birthday cards that pensioners send to you. She wore lipstick and it felt like it was the first time I’d ever seen her with lips. The heels and shoulder pads were thick and generous sandwiches, salad spilling from the sides. Her skirt and jacket were the same grey as Dad’s suit. Together they were a dull postcard from a county bored and staid. She rooted through her handbag, checked her purse and checked again.
‘Where are you going, Mum?’ asked Mal.
‘Out for a meal,’ she said. ‘I told your brother to tell you.’
She hadn’t told me, though, because she’d been too busy thinking about everyone else.
‘I’ve done you dinners, just warm them up, and there are cream slices in the fridge for afters, but we won’t be late anyway. Please try not to make a mess, and try not to break anything either. I’ve tidied up today.’ She tidied up every day.
The beep beep beep of the car on the drive, the chug of its engine and the dizzy petrol smell of it starting up meant she had to go. She stooped to kiss us both on the cheek. I rose to it, a strained neck like a chick getting fed muddy wriggling worms, still warm, from the beak of the huntress mother. Mal slunk lower still into the chair and wallowed in thick silence. When she could bend no more she planted a kiss on the top of his head, right in the centre of his shiny, black, angry mop of hair. All of the commotion and the noise followed Mum out of the house, and as the door closed we were suddenly shut off. Mal didn’t say a word.
Bed Page 5
