Fat

by Rob Grant

  He rose and slipped on his dressing gown. His penis protruded from it comically, like a pink Dalek's eye. He swaggered around the bedroom for a few moments, exclaiming 'Exterminate! Exterminate!' till his erection began to wilt and it was possible to contemplate peeing.

  For Jeremy, hygiene, both personal and domestic, was a necessary evil, to be performed in the shortest possible time, and preferably whilst simultaneously doing something else more useful. During the brief, weekly scamper over the living room carpet with the vacuum cleaner, for instance, he would be listening to a podcast or an audio book on his iPod. He would wash the pots -- again, once a week -- whilst making his obligatory parental phone call with his Bluetooth headset on.

  In this spirit, his morning ablutions had become fine-tuned to an almost ritualistic routine. He would lay out his clothes for the day on the bed, stacked in reverse order, so his suit jacket would be on the bottom and his socks and underpants on the top. He would click on the shower room light and enter. He would then load up his toothbrush, which lay on top of his cistern, in precise order next to his toothpaste, his can of shaving foam, his razor, mouthwash, deodorant, aftershave and cologne. He would turn on the hot tap in the sink, then sit on the loo, simultaneously evacuating his bodily waste whilst cleaning his teeth. By the time he'd performed both of these functions, the water would be warm enough for his shave. He would turn on the shower and then shave, swiftly, if not comprehensively, then rinse off the razor, the toothbrush and the sink, before pouring himself a capful of mouthwash and moving the bath towel from the back of the door to the radiator by the shower cubicle, where it would be convenient for the wetly blind post-shower grab. The shower would now be warm enough to use, and he would shower and gargle at the same time. The shower routine was rigidly observed: wash hair, then armpits, then crack, sac and penis, and let the rest of the body take care of itself. Rinse off, step out. Dry hair, back and armpits, wrap towel around waist, apply roll-on deodorant, then aftershave, then cologne. He would sit on the bed and drag his socks on his clammy feet, which very act would dry his bottom sufficiently for the application of underpants.

  He would be fresh and dressed, if still a little damp, within seven and a half minutes from rising. He had striven to improve this time, but any attempts at short cuts had led to minor disasters, including unsightly shaving cuts, dried soap stains around the neck or the omission of one or more odour inhibitors and a subsequent perceptible drop in office popularity.

  All of which meant he now had a small window (thirteen minutes) before he thrust himself into commuter bedlam. Time for a coffee, of the instant kind, and a phone call, of the subtly bragging kind.

  But to which friend might he best flaunt his latest success? Why, obviously the one who was currently failing most. As Gore Vidal said: it is not enough to succeed: others must fail. Derrian, then. Derrian did something naff in the City, and, rumour was, had been doing it rather badly of late.

  Derrian didn't quite qualify onto Jeremy's cellphone speed-dial. He was, in fact, Jeremy noted, the thirty-fifth entry in the handset's phone book. As the call connected, Jeremy wondered where he ranked in Derrian's contact list. Probably in the top twenty, if not in the speed-dial list itself. He was, after all, in Government now. More or less.

  'Yeah, mate. All right?' There seemed to be a lot of shouting where Derrian was. The Exchange? Christ. Did he start work before eight o'clock? Barbaric.

  'I'm good, my friend.' Jeremy adjusted his tie in the mirror and wondered if a blob of hair gel might be called for. 'Long time no powwow.'

  'Yeah, mate. What's happenin'?' 'Mate', again? He'd been spending too much time with those barrow-boy traders, had old Derrian.

  'Wondered if you'd like to hook up for lunch some time?'

  'Sounds good. When?'

  'Well, let's see. Can't make it today, I've--'

  'Not today, mate.'

  Damn! Boastus interuptus. Maybe he could still squeeze it in. 'Well, obviously not today. I've got a--'

  'Not this week, mate. I'm in Brussels.'

  'Brussels?' Bloody hell. Jeremy struggled not to sound interested.

  'Yeah, mate. Then next week, bloody Amsterdam.'

  Brussels? Amsterdam? Jeremy was buggered if he was going to ask why. 'Cool. Just call me when you get back.'

  'No problemo, mate. Catch you later.' And Derrian disconnected him.

  Disconnected him. The pikey bastard. No opportunity, no gap at all, to drop his proud little bombshell.

  Can't make it today. Got a big yawn of a meeting with the bloody Prime Minister. Mate.

  Jeremy grabbed his breakfast from the Pret A Manger by the Tube. A carrot juice and some sort of shitty muesli pot with yoghurt and honey. Given a choice, he'd rather have tucked into a full greasy spoon cafe fry-up. In fact, given a choice between the shitty pot of yoghurty muesli and a blender full of used French letters, he'd have opted for the condom smoothie, but he was briefing on health; he was, to all intents and purposes, a health expert, and he really had to show willing.

  In the Tube, he was crammed between a disgustingly fat woman and the rest of the disgustingly fat woman. She really was enormous. Herman Melville could have written a book about her. When the train lurched off, he was seriously worried he might trip and fall into her voluminous bosom and suffocate before a rescue team could winch him out again. How did they live with themselves, people that gross? How did she find time to travel on the Tube? Surely you had to spend every waking minute eating pure hydrogenized saturated fat to maintain those dimensions. He noticed with revulsion that there was something glistening greasily on the woman's chin, no doubt a remnant of the pint of melted lard she'd quaffed that morning, doubtless to wash down the whole suckling pig she'd consumed for breakfast, and her breathing was laboured and unpleasant. He began to feel nauseous. Then he was suddenly struck by a terrible vision of him puking up all over the seated commuters, and the woman falling on them greedily to lap up his vomit, and he had to get out.

  He fought his way out of the carriage at the next stop and crammed himself into the adjacent one. As the train moved off again, he caught a glimpse of the blimp woman in the next carriage through the intersecting windows. She'd spotted him. She'd realised why he'd moved carriages, and a look of deep, resonant sadness filled her eyes before she cast them down at the floor.

  A brief, a very brief, pang of guilt stabbed him, but he dismissed it easily. Yeah, well. She should do something about it, the weak-willed cow. Nobody was forcing her to eat whole herds of animals on a daily basis. No one put a gun to her head and made her devour the entire Irish potato harvest at every sitting. She needed educating. And educating fat people was what Jeremy was about to get famous for.

  He joined the flow out of the Tube station and paused for a few minutes at the Emporio Armani window, his second-favourite shop, suppliers of the very nice suit for which he'd stretched the plastic especially for today's meeting. Of course, he'd like to have a full-blown regular Armani suit, but that was out of his reach, just for the moment. Soon, very soon, he would be able to crank up his spending a gear or two, restock his wardrobe with full-on Armani, and his treasured Emporio suits would be gracing the racks in his local Mencap shop.

  He moved on. Now here was his favourite shop. A high-quality lingerie store. La Perla knickers. Wolford stockings and tights. The stuff that drool is made of. He was amazed how thoroughly aroused he could become looking at these items adorning lifeless mannequins. Christ, they didn't need to have arms or legs to turn him on. They didn't even need heads. What did that say about the male libido? What did it say about him?

  He bounded up the steps to the office, thinking he'd definitely need a shag tonight and thumbed through his phone's contact list in the lift, looking for his most likely prospect.

  THREE

  Hayleigh knew the alarm was coming. Her hand was hovering over the stop button for several minutes before the first hint of a buzz, and she managed to snap down on it before it had a chance to dis
turb anyone else in the house. Wednesday. Crap. Wednesday was just about the cruddiest day imaginable. Possibly, it was worse, even, than Monday. Because here you were, adrift and becalmed, slap bang in the middle of the week, the last Saturday morning long gone, and next Saturday so far off in the distance, you could hardly make it out on the horizon.

  She swung out of bed and tucked her feet into her novelty kitten slippers. It was cold, of course. The heating wouldn't go on for another half an hour, and Mum refused to leave it on all night because it was unhealthy. They could be stuck in a snowdrift in the middle of the Ice Age and Mum would not keep the heating on overnight.

  She shivered into her oversized dressing gown and padded into her bathroom. She felt around for the string dangling from the ceiling and tugged on it. The sudden shock of light stabbed into her eyes and she winced and squinted. It hurt a lot. Tears were actually forming. Her eyes seemed to be getting more and more sensitive to intense light. Photophobia, it was called. She'd looked it up on Wikipedia.

  When her eyes adjusted she looked up. To her absolute horror, her towel had slipped from her bathroom mirror and she was face to face with her own reflection. She stood there, frozen in shock and disgust, before she managed to gather her wits, grab up the towel and tuck it back in place.

  My God. What a pig she was. Hideous, hideous, hideous. She looked exactly like Napoleon in Animal Farm. The bit at the end, where he was all bloated and drinking and smoking with the humans. 'And she looked from pig to Hayleigh, and from Hayleigh to pig, and she couldn't tell the difference.'

  Her heart was thumping from the awfulness of it all. She couldn't afford to hang around too long, though. The parents would be up in, what? Twenty-three minutes. Move it, girl. Shake that giant booty.

  She scooped up her toothbrush and ran it under the tap until the water was just cold, rather than actually so far below Absolute Zero it would actually snap your limbs off.

  Even so, it was still a shock when the wet bristles hit her gums. Even her gums were getting more sensitive these days. She'd have to see if there was a word for that in Wikipedia.

  Her mouth tasted bad, really bad, as if bugs had been queuing up all night to poo in it. She would have liked to use toothpaste, but she did not dare. How many calories were in toothpaste? A hundred? A million? Who knows? They didn't put it on the packet, which Hayleigh thought was probably illegal. Millions of people all over the world brushing their teeth every day, in complete ignorance of the calorific values they were inadvertently ingesting. She shuddered involuntarily.

  She washed her hands and face in cold water. Not that she was worried about the calories in warm water, silly. No, first thing in the morning, the pipes started banging if you used the hot tap, and the heater whooshed on noisily in the main bathroom, and she couldn't risk disturbing her parents.

  She did not, however, use soap. Definitely not. She'd seen Fight Club at a sleepover at Fabiola's one night, and discovered, to her gobsmackment, that soap is made from fat. Totally made from fat. In the movie, scrummy Brad Pitt made it out of human fat, but Hayleigh assumed most soap was made out of regular animal fat. Appalling or what? Here you are, madam: rub this block of beef dripping all over your body. Let it seep in through the pores. Watch the pounds pile on. I think not, girlfriend. No way.

  She dressed as quickly as she could, back in the dark of her bedroom. Her clothes were all laid out in distinct, discrete piles so she could find them easily without having to turn the light on, and there was less chance of catching a glimpse of the rolls of fat that wobbled around her hips and belly. She tugged on her black woolly tights, trying not to touch the gruesome cellulite that pocked her thighs. She hated wearing tights precisely because they were exactly that: tight. She liked all her clothes to be loose. As loose as possible. But it was very cold outside, and school uniform was school uniform, there was no getting around that. She could, of course, have opted for trousers. But picture this scenario: she comes out of school and Jason Black from Big Boys Cry drives past in his limo with all his posse and sees her standing outside the gates in boy trousers. Nightmare! Would he stop the car and invite her in? I think not, girlfriend. Would he whisk a girl in boy trousers off to his Wembley Stadium gig, so she could sit backstage, or, better yet, just slightly in view so all her friends could see her there, with Jase looking over every few seconds in total love with her? Not going to happen. Cela ne se produira pas. Tights were really the only option.

  The skirt, though, was absolutely voluminous, and that was good. It was pleated, which made it almost twice as bulky as a regular skirt. The shirt was loose and billowy, and the cardigan was practically a Girl Guide tent. Excellemoso!

  She cracked open her bedroom door and took a large stride over the two creaky floorboards that lurked under the carpet just outside her room. She also had to avoid the third, eighth and ninth steps on the stairway. She crept down to the hall with as much stealth as her elephant frame could muster, then paused, still as a deer, and listened, wide-eyed and alert. She was rewarded with the gentle hum of a snore from her mum and dad's bedroom. Fantabuloso. She'd made it. She exhaled and the tension oozed out in her breath.

  Now was a tricky bit. There were two major obstacles in the hallway.

  They were mirrors.

  The toughest one was in front of her on her right, just by the front door. It was huge. It was virtually impossible to walk past that mirror without catching a glimpse of your disgusting wobbly self in your peripheral vision, and believez moi, she had tried. She had campaigned long and hard against that mirror. It was far too big for the tiny hall. But that was the point, Mum had said. It creates the illusion of space. Uh, no, it creates the illusion you're a woolly mammoth in a school uniform. She had even, in desperation, seriously smashed it to total pieces. But it was a poorly thought through plan. It had been difficult to explain how she had managed to accidentally swing her hockey stick no less than five times at the mirror ('I was wearing ear muffs, and didn't hear it') plus, of course, her parents had simply replaced it with, if anything, a slightly larger mirror. Genius.

  But that was not the problem mirror right now. She could easily avoid its accusatory glare by hugging her huge bulk tightly to the stair pole as she turned right to face the kitchen. The other mirror ran along the hall parallel to the stairs. Again, we're creating the illusion of space, here. Here's a wild, crazy thought, Mum: try creating the illusion of space by moving to a bigger house. That ought to do it for you.

  This mirror was bad because it was long. Seriously long. Two metres. Maybe more. Fortunately, it was not very tall, and it was hung quite high up, so all you had to do was duck below it. Of course, that caused its own problems if anybody else was around and caught you walking down the hall as if you were scurrying through a low tunnel, as that could start Mum off on one of her Famous Lectures, so you had to check there would be no observers before you could brave the trip to and from the kitchen. Sometimes you could be trapped in the kitchen for aeons, which could be an exquisite torture all of its own when that was positively the very last place on Earth you wanted to be.

  She ducked down and ran the gauntlet to the kitchen.

  Another tricky bit.

  Nothing was easy in this house, and that was a fact.

  First off, the door handle was noisy. You had to turn it very, very gently. Second, the upper half of the door was paned with glass. In the daylight, no problemo. In the morning half-light, it was pretty much another mirror, and you had to keep your gaze just in front of your porky little feet so you could just see the door handle on the edge of your vision. Again, she'd campaigned against the glass, on the grounds that it was (a) dangerous and (b) the kitchen, nice as it was, did not constitute a sufficiently engaging view to warrant a window, and nor did the hallway, so what the heck was the window for? For light, of course. It created the illusion of light. They were creating so many illusions around this place, they must have thought David Copperfield was moving in.

  She got the door
open almost silently, and closed it behind her with the same intense concentration. Again, she exhaled. She looked at the digital clock on the cooker. Nineteen minutes to go.

  She crossed to the kitchen window and made sure the shutters were closed as tight as they could go. The kitchen window was, technically, in view from Mum and Dad's room, though you probably had to be standing at a very strange angle with the curtains open to glimpse any light spillage. Still. Who knew what they got up to in there? It could very well involve striking strange poses for curious reasons with the curtains open.

  Satisfied the shutters were as sealed as was humanly possible, Hayleigh flicked on the kitchen light. She had an easy, well-practised routine now, and she could just about do it in her sleep.

  Switch on the grill, fill the kettle and put it on. Take the bacon and eggs out of the fridge. With the kitchen tongs, put the bacon on the grill pan and slide it under the heat. Get out the frying pan and put it on the hob. Turn the gas on. Put some olive oil in the pan. Get the slices of bread out of the cupboard and pop them into the toaster, ready to hit the on button just after the eggs have started frying. When the kettle boils, warm the teapot and empty it out. Put the tea bags in and fill up the teapot. Check the bacon. When it's ready to turn, turn it with the tongs and crack the eggs into the frying pan, then turn the timer on the toaster to just less than two. Put the glass lid on the frying pan, so the eggs cook without having to splash them with oil. Lay the breakfast table.

  Now, check the timing. This was the crucial part. Seven twenty-seven precisely, put the bacon and eggs on the plates. One egg for Mum, one for Jonny, two for Dad, one for her. Three rashers of bacon for Dad and Jonny, two for Mum, one for her. At the ping of the toaster, remove the toast to the rack and put another load on, this time with the timer set just above one because the elements are already hot.