Fat

by Rob Grant

  Because there, on the quadrangle, parked right next to the awful Ms Davies' truly awful pink Smart car, was her mother's 4x4.

  DINNER Menu

  Cabbage Soup

  Steamed fish with Bok Choi That Tastes Like Cabbage Soup

  --o0o--

  Meat- and Taste-free Chilli

  --o0o--

  Mixed Grill without Chips and Peas

  --o0o--

  Definitely No Rhubarb Crumble or Custard

  --o0o--

  Glucose, Saline & Liquidized Snickers Bar Cask with Just a Soupcon of Morphine

  'I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.'

  (Walt Whitman: Leaves Of Grass, 1885)

  TWENTY-ONE

  Well, Grenville was thinking, that was one mystery cleared up. That was why there had been no need for any good cop, bad cop routine. They knew full well they wouldn't have to coerce any kind of confession out of him. They had him bang to rights, in flagrante, DVD available in all good stores from Monday.

  He stirred uncomfortably in his chair. 'Soooo. What happens now?'

  DC Redmond flicked back her fringe. 'Here's the thing: all this stuff, plus your statement, will now go to the Crown Prosecution Service, and they'll decide whether or not to prosecute, though, given the evidence, I don't think they're going to pass this one up. Then, normally, we'd agree bail and release you, and you would appear in Magistrate's Court, probably tomorrow morning.'

  Grenville didn't like the sound of that. There was a big, invisible 'but' hanging over that sentence.

  'However,' Redmond went on, 'Mrs Curtiz is very nervous that you might try to interfere with her, and that--'

  'What?!' Grenville screwed his face in disbelief. 'Interfere with her? I wouldn't touch the bloody woman with a diseased leper's dick.'

  'She feels intimidated by you, and she is the chief prosecution witness, and given the somewhat violent nature of the offence, we have to take her seriously.'

  'It looked a lot, lot worse than it actually was.' Grenville pointed at the blank screen. 'I'm fairly sure that footage has been doctored, because that is not how I remember it at all.' He looked around at his legal representative for some kind of back-up, here.

  'It did look fairly violent.' He shrugged.

  Thank you, Atticus.

  'I'll talk it over with my colleague,' Redmond went on. 'Since you have no previous record, the balance may well be in your favour.'

  'And otherwise?'

  'Otherwise you'll have to spend the night in the holding cells.'

  A whole night in that dreadful cell, on that dreadful excuse for a bed? Grenville turned to Whitman and was astonished to see quite how impassive and unperturbed he appeared to be about this latest horror. 'Are you going to stand for this? Are you going to let them bang me up overnight?'

  'Well, I hardly think that's going to be--' and the bastard's phone went off again. He held up his palm, picked the mobile up with his other hand, flicked it open and checked the caller ID. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I have to take this one,' and started to rise from his seat.

  Something inside Grenville snapped. He was mad as hell, and he wasn't going to take it any more.

  He leapt up and grabbed the phone roughly. The raw power generated by a combination of Grenville's weight and momentum astonished them both, in fact, inadvertently sending Whitman crashing back onto his chair, which went tumbling backwards to the floor. But Grenville didn't stop there. He arced back his arm and hurled the offending mobile hard against the far wall, where it impacted with a satisfying crack and broke into several pieces.

  Something flashed at the edge of Grenville's vision and he half-turned just in time to see Detective Constable Redmond leap onto the table and hurl herself at him. He had no time to react, other than to spit out the words: 'What are you doo--' before she crashed into his ribcage, hurling him backwards. He smashed through his own chair, painfully, splintering it into firewood, and walloped down onto the fragments, hard. He would probably still be picking the splinters out of his arse in his late seventies.

  The policewoman was on top of him. It had been a long time since Grenville had actually had a woman kneeling over him, and he wished the circumstances might have allowed him to enjoy the moment, just a little, but she did something skilfully painful to his arm and wrist that forced him to roll over onto his front and more jagged slivers of erstwhile chair dug into entirely new parts of him. He felt the cuffs snap around his wrists again, and then Redmond stood up, breathless.

  Grenville managed to roll onto his back again.

  The room appeared to be devastated, as if a poltergeist army had suddenly swept through it. It didn't seem possible that this amount of destruction could have been wrought in so short a time. Chairs were broken, or scattered on the floor. The table had been tipped over, spilling tape recorders and paperwork all over the place. Whitman was still sitting on his chair, with its back on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, his briefcase contents spilled around him. It was a nightmare. Grenville praised the Lord they hadn't been videoing this little interview. He would have been Alcatraz-bound for sure.

  'What,' he said to the panting detective, 'was all that about?'

  'I think that was about you kissing goodbye to the bail option.' Redmond swept her hand through her hair. 'Unless your learned counsel disagrees.'

  Whitman, who still seemed to be in some kind of shock, shook his head in the negative, without taking his eyes from the ceiling. 'See that?' he said. 'That was another rampage.'

  With great difficulty and great pain and, nonetheless, great dignity, Grenville hauled himself into a kneeling position and then to his feet, handcuffs notwithstanding. 'And you, you bastard,' he nodded at the idiot solicitor, Alan Sugar style, 'you're fired.'

  TWENTY-TWO

  Hayleigh could hardly focus as she struggled into her gym gear, which she had to do with a towel draped over her so the other girls couldn't see how truly gross her body really was, if you hadn't guessed.

  Her mother, here at the school. In the middle of the day. What could that mean? Hayleigh's fevered brain raced around, desperately searching for some possibly benign explanation for such a potentially nightmarish combination of unlikelinesses. Maybe Hayleigh had left something in the car? Or at home? Some piece of homework, perhaps? But no, she couldn't come up with anything. Perhaps Mum herself had forgotten to put something in her lunchbox. A two-hundred-pound bar of Galaxy chocolate, maybe, to supplement the million-calorie banquet she'd already laid on. Hayleigh doubted that. She must have arrived at the end of lunch, or Hayleigh would surely have noticed the car on her way across the playground.

  She finished dressing and hung up the towel. Most of the rest of the girls were already in the hall. There was just Sasha Patak, sitting on the corner of a bench, making a meal of pulling on her trainers because she hated gym class, absolutely hated it, poor thing. Think, Hayleigh, think! A family accident? Perhaps Jonny had broken his arm or something. That would be a good scenario. That would be a great scenario. Only, why would that bring her mother here, now? Had Hayleigh forgotten she had some sort of dentist appointment or something? No, Mum always arranged those kinds of things for the half-term break, to make them doubly horrible, thank you so very much. She kept running through increasingly unlikely possibilities -- Mum was applying for a job as a teaching assistant, a dinner lady, a janitor -- anything was better than contemplating the alternatives that were actually likely.

  She ran out into the hall without enthusiasm. To her horror, Mrs Mellish wasn't there.

  Hayleigh's stomach performed an impressive series of somersaults. Oh, please, please God, don't let Mum be talking to Mrs Melons. In the absence of supervision, the girls had mostly broken into chattering clusters and the boys had started larking about. It would only be a matter of minutes before the whole gym class civilisation broke down, and they'd be in Lord of the Flies country.

  To distract herself, Hayleigh grabbed a netball and started shooting. She was a p
retty good shooter, and she almost, almost lost herself in it. She was just about to score a winning penalty goal for the England Olympic team in Beijing when suddenly the noise level in the room dropped to almost zero. Hayleigh turned and saw Mrs Mellish walking towards her across the hall. And Hayleigh's mother was walking in her wake. The dreadful Mellish must have phoned her. Which was probably an infringement of Hayleigh's human rights. Crappy poo puddings. She would not have liked to have heard that conversation.

  And now they were united against her. They were coming for her, and nothing could stop them.

  Well, this was it.

  The Big One.

  The Perfect Storm.

  There was the fan, there was the shit.

  And Hayleigh was going to get covered in it.

  Mrs Mellish shouted out some brisk commands to the class, and the kids all started running, with various degrees of conviction, in laps around the hall.

  Hayleigh threw down the ball and ran over to join the lappers, running in the opposite direction, obviously, from Mrs Mellish, her mother and the disasters they were trying to inflict on her.

  Mrs Mellish yelled out for her to stop, but she pretended not to hear. It was a dismal ploy, doomed to failure, which would, at best, buy her thirty more seconds of freedom, but it was all she had, and she seized it.

  And Hayleigh didn't really know what happened next. One minute she was in full flight, like a desperate stallion that had leapt from its corral and was making a hopeless bolt for freedom, and the next she was lying on the gym floor, her mum crouched beside her, with Mrs Mellish gone, and the rest of the class staring down at her with very strange expressions indeed.

  Mum was talking. At least, she looked as if she was talking, but it was very soft, and Hayleigh couldn't quite hear her. Hayleigh raised her head and looked around, trying to get her bearings, and caught sight of her right leg in her jogging bottoms, which was bent at a very curious angle, like one leg of a swastika, as if her knee was on backwards, like Jonny sometimes posed his Action Man. Only it looked as if her leg wasn't bent at the knee. Wow. It looked like it should have hurt, but it didn't. She looked at her mum, puzzled, for some kind of explanation that would make sense, but, oddly, it looked as if it was Mum who was actually in pain. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and she was wearing a bitter little kind of tight, tight smile.

  Hayleigh tried to speak, to reassure her mum that she was all right, and there was nothing to worry about, when a bright white lightning bolt shot all along her frail little body, and stabbed into her brain, and she blanked out.

  And, mercifully, she didn't wake up again until the ambulance was almost at the hospital.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jeremy and Jemma endured dinner in the cafeteria. Jeremy opted for cabbage soup, which appeared to be nothing more than slightly warm water with cabbage in it, and steamed fish with bok choi, which tasted like warm water with cabbage in it, and he was grateful he could borrow Jemma's salt. Jemma opted for a meat-free chilli, which turned out to be not only free of meat, but free of texture, spice and taste.

  There was no dance that night, of course, and no lecture to attend. There was, in fact, absolutely nothing to do. They both had plenty of work they could attend to, however, so they said their goodnights and went to their respective dorms. So much for Jeremy's amorous ambitions.

  They each had an entire dorm to themselves. Jeremy sat at the table in his living area for an hour or so, transferring his notes and thoughts onto his laptop, but the chair was so infernally uncomfortable, he couldn't take it any more. He stood up and checked his watch. It was barely eight-thirty. Could he seriously go to bed before eight-thirty? He hadn't done that since he was seven years old. But the only alternative would be to go to the gym, and he could hardly start pumping iron in his Emporio Armani suit and Versace shirt. He could wear his sleeping T-shirt, but then it would get all sweaty.

  He could go for a walk, he supposed, but he'd really done enough walking for the day. Besides, there really wasn't anywhere to walk to.

  Bed, then. At least he'd be up early to delight in whatever passed for breakfast in this hell hole.

  He moved into the dormitory. God, it was depressing. Presumably, residents were not to be encouraged to spend too much time in here, either. He sat on a bed, which was, predictably, exceptionally uncomfortable.

  Maybe he could improve his comfort level by stacking another mattress on top.

  In the end, it took a pile of four mattress before the bed was remotely sleepworthy.

  He went into the bathroom, which was large and reasonably well equipped. There was a shower section, with a rank of five shower heads side by side. He fought off an image of five morbidly obese people soaping each other up, then went into one of the five WC cubicles. He was just undoing his belt when he remembered the CCTV cameras. Then he remembered that the toilets were equipped to weigh everybody's waste, and he lost the urge to take a dump.

  He consoled himself with the thought that the loos were doubtless designed for minimum comfort levels, too, and it would not have been a relaxing experience in any way, shape or form. He stripped to his waist, washed and brushed his teeth, then went back to the dorm.

  He pulled on the Well Farm T-shirt he'd blagged from Stone for sleeping, then, ever mindful of the cameras, he climbed under the covers and tugged off his trousers.

  Eight-thirty. He doubted he'd get any sleep, thinking about the CCTV which might or might not have been recording his every move. Damn it, he couldn't even risk a quick hand shandy.

  Sometime around two in the morning, he finally dropped off.

  He didn't wake until he heard Jemma knocking at the dormitory door. He sat up in a panic, not quite remembering where he was. In some kind of hospital ward? An army barracks? A youth hostel? He tried to get up but he'd forgotten about the mattress stack, mistimed his landing and tumbled roughly to the floor, banging his head quite nastily against his bedside drawers.

  'Jeremy? Are you all right?'

  He suppressed several swear words and called back: 'Fine. I'm fine. Be out in a sec.' And scrabbled around trying to find his trousers. Where the hell had he left them?

  Jemma knocked again. 'Are you sure you're all right?'

  'Absolutely. One hundred per cent hunky-dory.' The trousers had somehow gotten themselves tangled in the bedclothes. His beautiful Emporios, rumpled beyond recognition. 'Just coming,' he called.

  He made the mistake of trying to tug on his trousers whilst simultaneously walking to the door and fell over again, this time catching his chin on a bedpost. He thought he might actually have blacked out for a second or two, because the next thing he knew, Jemma was bending over him with an expression halfway between concern and amusement. 'Jeremy?'

  'I'm fine.' He tried to stand up, to regain some small iota of decorum, but realised his trousers were still round his knees, and fell over again. He seriously hoped the CCTV cameras weren't running. This entire episode would definitely make the Christmas bloopers tape. He grabbed the trousers, tugged them up and stood, running his hand through his hair and grinning broadly as if that was all it would take to restore his dignity. 'Morning,' he said brightly, as if this was how he normally started every day: a full-blown slapstick performance with his trousers round his ankles.

  'What's happened to your face?'

  Jeremy's hand shot up to his forehead, where a nasty, painful bruise was starting to swell. 'Had a bit of a tumble.'

  'A bit of a tumble? You look like the losing finalist of an Ultimate Fighting bout.' Jemma scanned the dorm. 'You were here on your own, weren't you? I mean, you weren't sharing with a gang of Nazi skinheads or anything, were you?'

  'Tripped and fell is all.'

  'Well, we'd better get going. Helicopter leaves in fifteen minutes. Don't suppose you mind skipping breakfast.'

  Jeremy definitely did not mind skipping breakfast. He wanted out of there as soon as possible. He wanted real food. He wanted bacon. Greasy bacon. He wanted eggs. He
wanted a dump. But more than anything else, he wanted privacy.

  Stone chauffeured them to the helicopter pad in his golf cart. He gave them both a VIP goodie bag, full of Well Farm literature and knick-knacks, shook their hands and said his goodbyes.

  The chopper flight back to London seemed infinitely less glamorous than the outward trip, but at least Jemma was more inclined to chat. They had to shout over the noise of the blades, of course, so the conversation was necessarily simplified, which, with Jemma, was a mercy.

  'Listen,' Jeremy yelled, 'I've been thinking about what you were saying.'

  'Which bit of it?'

  'All of it. Are you going to recommend they close the project down?'

  'God, no. Not that they'd listen anyway. They'd probably have me shot.'

  That was a relief. This gig would be the making of Jeremy, and he didn't want any negativity kiboshing it before he even had a chance to shine.

  'No,' Jemma reiterated. 'They've invested billions in it. They're not going to stop now. Certainly not on the say so of a low-life research assistant from ULIST.'

  'But you think it's a bad thing, all in all?'

  'It's definitely a bad thing for the poor sods who sign up for it. Dangerous, even. Completely against the Prime Directive in medicine: first, do no harm.'

  'So you don't feel guilty, just standing by and letting it happen?'

  'I'm not Joan of Arc, Jeremy. I know when I's beat. I think they'll figure out the whole thing's a disaster before they do too much damage. People will simply stop coming when the word gets out the regimen's a flop. When the clientele dry up, the farms will close down quietly and expensively and get turned into holiday camps and theme parks. Plus: there are upsides.'