by Rob Grant
With the tongs, smear the single rasher of bacon around her plate, leaving as much greasy residue as possible. Then, with a knife, break the egg and smear some of the yolk around the plate, and then -- great touch, this one -- just dab a little of the yellow goo on yourself. Could be on your sleeve, on your shirt, wherever. Just so long as it is discreetly visible. This morning she does a daring one: she pats a tiny blob just by the corner of her mouth.
Now, with the tongs, lift up the egg and drop it into the waste disposal, then do the same with the bacon. You don't want the plate to look like it's been scraped, thank you so much. Leave the plate by the sink. Put a slice of toast on a side plate and cut it with a knife to leave a convincing number of toasty crumbs. Put the toast in the waste disposal, fish the tea bags out of the pot and pop them in the waste disposal on top of everything else. Now, with one hand on the waste disposal switch and the other on the tap, a combo that is probably potentially lethally dangerous, you wait.
You wait until, on the stroke of seven thirty, Mum and Dad's radio alarm blares into life. You turn on the tap and switch on the waste disposal and, voila -- your work is done, and you can finally chill. Just pour yourself a cup of hot water and kick back with your magazine, drooling over piccies of Jase, and wait for everyone to slouch into the kitchen with their silly hair and sleep-confused expressions. Same old same old, every day.
Only this time, it didn't work like that.
This time, when Maroon Five blasted down the stairs with 'This Love' from her parents' radio alarm, Hayleigh hit the tap and water cascaded into the sink, and she flicked the waste disposal switch and nothing happened.
OK. No panic. She flicked the switch off and back on again. Still nothing.
This had happened before. Not to Hayleigh but to her mum, and there was some kind of button you pressed under the sink that made it work again.
She flung open the cupboard doors and crouched down low. There were so many bottles and packets down here you could hardly see anything. She certainly couldn't see a switch.
She heard the floorboards creaking upstairs, and somewhere, a toilet flushed. She felt around under the waste disposal, but found nothing remotely button-like. Her hands darted frantically over every exposed part of the machinery. Was this dangerous? She gave up, closed the doors and straightened.
In round about thirteen seconds, a parent was going to come into the kitchen, spot the charade and Hayleigh's life, as she knew it, would effectively be over.
FOUR
Grenville pulled up in the health club car park. It was a vast car park, and there were at least sixty or seventy free spaces, but dozens of people all seemed to be cruising around it, trying desperately to find the nearest space possible to the entrance. It seemed odd to Gren that anyone would expend such effort simply to avoid a walk of, at worst, seventy yards, especially since, he had to assume, they were coming to the health club to exercise. Baffling. They would avoid walking two hundred feet in order to go upstairs and jog two miles on a running machine. That's the gym crowd for you.
He got out of his car. Again, not as easy as it sounds for a man of Grenville's bulk. Any kind of bending hurt. All kinds of activities that are normally simple and mundane for Off The Peggers are arduous for people of Grenville's bulk. Pulling on your underpants, for instance. When you are of Grenville's bulk, you cannot balance easily on one leg, as if you are a delicate, lithe flamingo. You have to do it sitting down. Pulling on your socks, harder still. You have to sit down and contort your legs into very strange angles. Very strange angles that your legs do not want to remain in. You have to strike poses that cause pains in strange parts of your body, and you have to pull the sock on quickly before you inflict permanent damage. It can take upwards of five attempts just to get one sock on, by which time the theoretical heel of the sock can be just about anywhere. Sometimes, Grenville seriously considered giving up and going sockless for the day, but it hadn't quite come to that. Not yet, anyway.
Shoes. Shoes were in their own league from hell. You could kill yourself trying to put on a pair of cowboy boots, as Gren had learned to his despair. No. Slip-ons were best, and even then you needed a three-feet-long shoehorn, bodily contortions, some steps or a stair, bones made of India rubber and a high pain threshold. But Gren had not been able to secure a pair of slip-on trainers, and so had to endure the double agony of actually getting his feet inside them and then having to do up the laces.
By the time he was dressed for the gym, Gren felt he'd already exercised sufficiently to lose a stone or two.
He walked into the club, and as soon as he passed the reception desk, the liniment aroma hit him. Who used that stuff? What did they use it for? He'd managed to live his whole life so far without ever feeling an urgent need for liniment, without encountering any injury that needed linimenting, even slightly.
Entry to the club proper involved running your pass card through a reader and squeezing through a turnstile. It looked ungenerous, the turnstile, and he had visions of himself stuck in it, and having to be cut free by firemen with oxyacetylene torches. There was a disabled entrance, but you had to ask the receptionist to operate that, and Grenville decided the rescue services option would be the less embarrassing.
He knew where he was going. He'd joined the club a few weeks earlier, and this was to be his induction assessment.
It would not be an outright lie to say that Grenville was dreading this more than anything he'd dreaded since his school days.
He thought that at least if he was already dressed for the gym, he could avoid the changing room and its depressing penis parade, though, truth be told, since he could no longer see his own penis without the aid of a mirror, unless it was very happy indeed, looking at other people's might bring something lost back to his life.
He jogged, slightly, up the stairs to the gym, or at least up three or four of them. He didn't want to arrive at his fitness assessment completely shagged out and knackered.
His appointment had been with a male gym assistant, but, of course, the lad had reported in sick and a pretty young woman was covering for him, so as to absolutely maximise Grenville's humiliation. He'd expected no less.
She made him run through the usual diseases and disorders list, none of which Grenville had, and most of which disgusted him. Grenville decided, anyway, to tick the box that said 'menstrual cramping', just to lighten up the proceedings a tad, but the girl just clucked impatiently and brought out a fresh sheet for him to start all over again. Even claiming he'd thought it had read 'minstrel camping' drew nary a smile.
She then took his blood pressure. Then she took his blood pressure again, because, Grenville assumed, she was so astonished the machine didn't out and out explode. It turned out his blood pressure was, amazingly, fine. As was his resting heart rate. She made him do five minutes on the exercise bike, which seemed excessive to Gren, but his heart rate actually went down during the exercise. The girl tapped the digital read-out quite violently, but the figures didn't change.
Apart from the discomfort the physical exertion had caused him, Grenville was actually beginning to feel good about the whole experience.
Which feeling was soon to pass.
Because next came the physical measurements.
First came his waist. He held out his arms and prayed that, first and foremost, she could actually distinguish his waist from the rest of him, and second, that the tape would actually be long enough to reach all the way around him, and she didn't have to leave a chalk mark and do him in sections or something.
She wrote the measurement down in his chart. Grenville was hoping she would write it in centimetres, which he found hard to convert, but she wrote it in inches, and he was glad the blood pressure armband wasn't still around his arm, because the figure almost gave him a heart attack.
How many inches?
Why, surely not.
That could not be.
Was that not, in fact, his height she'd in some way unintentionally measured? Had
she somehow written down the dimensions of some plunge pool the club was thinking of having constructed? Did she accidentally wrap the tape measure around two other people who'd been standing behind him, queuing to use the body balls?
But he had no time to recover from that shock before the next ordeal confronted him.
The weighing machine.
Now, Grenville really had no idea precisely how much he weighed. His own bathroom scales had been put down humanely long ago because of the accusing way they looked at him when he emerged from the shower. He prayed there were enough counterbalancing weights to cope with his bulk.
'If you'd just like to step onto the scales now, Mr Roberts.'
'What? Just like that?' The words leapt from his throat in some bizarre kind of falsetto. Grenville was aghast. He never weighed himself with his shoes on. He never weighed himself with his clothes on. In fact, normally he would even remove his wristwatch and trim his nails before going anywhere near a set of scales. He hadn't eaten breakfast that morning, precisely in preparation for this moment, but he really needed to vacate his bladder and bowels before he was ready to--
'Just step right on.' The idiot girl beamed.
Grenville stepped right on.
The girl fiddled with the counterweights. She seemed to have underestimated, because she fiddled with them again. In all, as every spare droplet of blood in Grenville's body made an emergency detour to his face, the girl fiddled with the counterweights twenty-three times before she achieved equilibrium. Then she smiled, like you might smile at an off-duty circus freak, and invited him to step down.
Grenville didn't want to look at what she'd written in his chart, but he couldn't help himself.
How many pounds?
No.
Surely some mistake.
Could it really be so?
This was much, much worse than he had even dared dread.
Was that not, in fact, precisely the same weight as his motor car?
Gren looked over his shoulder in case he was inadvertently giving a piggyback to a human pyramid comprised of the Metropolitan Police motorcycle formation team.
There had to be some explanation. Dark matter had somehow leaked in from another dimension at the precise spot and moment he was being weighed. These were the wrong scales, the product of some comical mix-up with scales used to ensure lorries did not exceed the maximum load a bridge could bear. He suddenly started to panic because he was not on the ground floor and at any moment could bring the entire building crashing down around their ears. He was definitely thinking they had better not ask him to do any jumping or skipping.
The girl was looking at him oddly. Clearly, she'd been speaking to him, and Grenville, off in his terrible funk, had not heard her.
'I'm sorry?' The man-mountain smiled.
'What we need to do now is list your targets.'
Targets? They were giving him targets now? What were they going to do? Stuff him into a super gun, aim him at the Middle East and use him as some kind of human smart bomb? 'Targets?'
'Your personal targets. What you hope to achieve from your exercise programme.'
'My targets, right.' Well, let's see now. His primary target, right now, was to get the hell out of this place and never come anywhere near it again. Secondly, he'd like to destroy his chart, and, while he was at it, the weighing machine, the tape measure and probably this idiot girl who was a first-hand witness to his humiliation. Or, at the very least, somehow wipe her memory of the whole sorry affair. 'What do I hope to achieve from my exercise programme?'
Normalcy. That's what he'd like to achieve. He'd like to be normal. He'd like to be Off The Peg again. He'd like to be able to buy and wear decent clothes in colours that were not even vaguely psychedelic. He'd like young girls like this to look at him, if not with lust and desire, then at least without pity. He'd like to be able to trim his toenails without fear of fainting. He'd like to be able to get in a bath and then get out again, instead of floundering for hours on end like a helpless giant squid with seven broken tentacles. He'd like to get on an aeroplane and fasten the safety belt, and not have to endure the humiliation of asking for a seatbelt extension normally reserved for pregnant women. He'd like to get in and out of his car without pain. How about that for a target?
'General fitness?' The girl arched her eyebrows.
'General fitness, definitely.'
'Weight loss?' she offered helpfully.
'Weight loss would be good,' Grenville agreed. 'Weight loss would be dandy.'
'Shall we set a monthly target?'
Again with the targets. Grenville would have liked to set a target on this girl's forehead and use it for crossbow practice. 'OK, a monthly target.'
'Say, two pounds a month?'
Two pounds? Grenville could lose four pounds with a decent bowel movement. 'Two pounds doesn't seem like much.'
'We recommend a slow but steady weight-loss programme.'
'Fine.'
She took him around the machines and devised for him an exercise programme that wouldn't tax a bedridden octogenarian with plastic bags for lungs, and a truly dismal low-fat, no-sugar diet sheet which had failed Grenville three times so far. A pound a fortnight? Brilliant. With iron will and rigid discipline, Grenville could be down to his recommended body weight by the age of three hundred and forty-seven.
FIVE
The detritus of Hayleigh's unconsumed breakfast was floating round the sink like debris from the Titanic. She had to think fast. OK. A plastic carrier bag. There was a sack of them hanging on the cellar doorknob, just outside the kitchen. She dashed to the kitchen door and flung it open. She heard her parents' bedroom door open. Crappy crud burgers.
She snatched a Waitrose bag out of the sack, raced back into the kitchen and flung the door closed to buy her a second or two of extra time. The door slammed loudly, and she would get a ticking off for that, but so what, now? She heard her dad's clumsy footsteps on the landing. He would be down in seconds. Seconds. He didn't have to step over the creaky floorboards outside his door, or dodge over stairs three, eight and nine. Neither of the mirrors held any kind of terror for him. He could practically race down the hall. And to Hayleigh that sounded exactly like what he was doing. He negotiated the stairway with all the easy grace of a herd of hysterical hippopotamuses fleeing a jungle fire with Doc Martens on their feet.
She fished around in the sink with her tongs and caught up a slice of soggy toast, but when she lifted it clear of the water, it disintegrated wetly and dropped back into the water.
Dad landed on the polished wood of the hall floor like a Sherman tank that had been dropped from a plane and its parachute had failed to open.
Nothing for it. She had to abandon the tongs and, grimacing like a first-time vet shoving his arm up a cow's backside, she fished the bacon and the bits of egg out of the water and dropped them into the bag. She went in again and scooped out as many of the soggy remnants of toast as she could manage, dumped them into the bag and tied off the top of it
Now what? Mercifully, Dad seemed to be hesitating in the hall. Possibly he'd caught sight of himself in the mirror and was desperately failing to adjust his hair so it might look marginally less silly. The taunting mirror, ironically, had become her saviour.
She thought about the pedal bin, but it was too risky. There was a chance Mum might find the Waitrose bag and wonder what it was doing there, and...
With no choices left, she lifted up her skirt and stuffed the bag down the back of her tights. Ha! Her hideous tights had come to the rescue. Of course, her bum now looked even more monumentally fat than ever, and the very notion of the greasy swill in the Waitrose bag pressed so close to her skin was enough to induce a heaving fit, if she thought about it too much, so she tried not to think about it at all. She tried to think about something nice. She tried to think about Jase. Dad yawned into the kitchen, with hair so thoroughly silly, a team of highly trained barbers would have to work round the clock for weeks on end on scaffoldin
g to rescue it even marginally.
'Hey, Hay,' he said, as he did every morning, finding new bits of himself to scratch every second or two. 'What up?'
Hayleigh leaned back against the sink with her arms outstretched so he wouldn't be able to see into it. There was still evidence floating around in there: small slivers of wet toast and streaks of congealed yolk she hadn't managed to scoop. As she leaned back, though, she heard the bag in her tights rustle, and she was pretty sure Dad heard it too, but he didn't seem to react. "Sall good.' She forced a smile. 'Made brekkie.'
He turned his sleepy eyes towards the table. 'Lush.' He grinned.
Hayleigh rolled her eyes. Dad picked up what he thought were cool words by secretly reading her magazines, and, of course, he always used them incorrectly. He slouched towards the table. 'Good girl. I'd give you a kiss, but I'm afraid my mouth smells like a New Orleans swamp with bodies floating in it.'
Hayleigh rolled her eyes again. Dad had a fairly sick sense of humour. Hayleigh's eyes got a lot of exercise when Dad was around.
He sat at the table, took some toast from the rack and started buttering it. 'Where's yours?'
Damn. Hayleigh liked to time it so she could be pretending to finish the last mouthful when the first witness arrived in the kitchen. Then she could lean back, chewing air, pat her stomach with counterfeit satisfaction and move her plates to the sink making yum-yum sounds. This morning, of course, there had been no time for that little playlet. Worse, the plates were in the wrong place. They were by the toaster, where she'd never normally leave them. Trying to look casual, she picked them up and popped them by the sink, where any suspicious eyes could scan them in vain for forgery. 'I finished mine, you lazy boneses. I've still got some homework to do.'
Dad just grunted. He preferred them all to take their meals together whenever it was possible. Hayleigh found watching everyone else stuffing their gullets a rather arduous experience, if you want to know the truth. Thoroughly unpleasant. But unfinished homework was the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow of excuses. Not that Hayleigh ever fell behind with her homework for a millisecond. Let's face it: what else did she have to do in her sad, blubbery life? She headed for the kitchen door so she could traverse the hall before... darn it.
