fat
She lies on the crumpled bed, slides the needle into the soft flesh of her inner thigh, depresses the plunger, injects the serum and purges herself of her nasty, flabby, excess fat. At least, that’s what the peeling label on the phial promises her. If she sticks to her balanced low-calorie diet, exercises regularly and controls her pangs of hedonic hunger. Which she doesn’t. Her issue is that she lacks the will to succeed. She gives in too easily.
Purge over for yet another restless night, she calms, her rib cage rising then sinking. She holds a damp swab over her puncture wound and slips the damned prickle out of her, laying it to rest in its cheap, pink, plastic kidney dish. To be disposed of later, with all her other contaminated sharps.
‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ she says, exhaling, kidding, herself, ‘Hardly felt it, did you?’ She knows, the purge will always hurt her, ‘Still, I suppose, if it helps me shed all my ugly fat?’
She draws back the curtains to see the cruel night. The cul-de-sac is silent for once. There are no fire sirens screaming down Main Street, no building works, home restorations or birds singing, to invade her inner peace. She shuts them out, sits sideways-on, on the edge of her bed in just her worn black hipster pants and inspects her body shape in front of the gilt-edged mirror on the wall.
‘See all the sore red weals where your bra and pants cut grooves in your fatty flesh, Vicki?’
Stressed out, she lies on the bed and tries to relax, her legs and arms flopped uselessly on the bed. After weeks of daily injections, she has failed to see any changes in her body. She is still the same fat, pudgy, fed-up girl she was when lockdown deprived her of a blossoming career in fast food pasta retail management running the rundown Café Amalfitano in Main Street.
Her odious brother suggested, since she is a stickler for detail with A-levels in English and a deep love of books, she take up proof reading, advertising her services online. Demand for her critically sharp yet fair pair of eyes from busy writers astonished her. She never returned to the café. Instead, with help from her wealthy mother, she took out a mortgage on a hovel in a quiet cul-de-sac off a side street: a single garage converted into a bedroom-bathroom-kitchenette. There she immersed herself, correcting the constant flow of manuscripts that fluttered like the first welcome butterflies of Spring through her brass letterbox.
She made a lot of money. Made herself really fat. At least, that’s how she feels she looks. Gross.
She keeps her scales on a square tile of black lino in a corner of the bedroom. Drained, exhausted, she climbs up on the scales, alarmed to discover her BMI has soared high as twenty-seven, which means that she is obese in her distrait mind: five feet six inches tall, thirty-three inches around her waist, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-five pounds.
Ashamed of herself, hiding her body from view, she dresses quickly in a black vest, loose-fitting jeans and anklets. Checks the time: three-thirty: the small hours. The alarm shrieks just as she is making the bed. She switches it off, zips her pink Amalfi 4-wheel, hard shell, medium-sized case then waits for her taunting hunger pangs to return.
Vicki hides her treats on a high-up shelf in the cupboard in the kitchenette. She puts the kettle on, takes down a floral china teacup, dispenses four sweeteners then adds a peppermint tea bag from her glass-topped wooden boxed selection: to help her sleep. Bread she stores in a cream enamelled metal bread bin with a fawn wheatsheaf on the top. She flips the lid and lifts out the wholemeal sourdough loaf she bought in the fashionable new bread shop in town a day ago. It feels hard, firm, crusted, in her grip. It’s going stale and needs eating up. She pulls the bread board out of its stand, draws a serrated knife out of its wooden block, sets the loaf, and prepares to slice. One slice or two? She carves herself three tranches of sourdough.
The toaster has three wide slots designed to take crumpets, bagels, doorstops of bread. She slots the chunks into the toaster, eying the shallow glass butter dish by the bread bin. The butter is soft: perfect for spreading. Opening the cupboard, she reaches up and takes down an unopened jar of crunchy peanut butter. The label on the jar says this brand is one hundred percent free of palm oil. It has a strip of red tamper-proof cellophane round the top. She breaks the seal, tears it off, and unscrews the lid, baulking at the layer of fatty oil covering the peanuts.
The kettle boils: she makes tea. Her toast pops up: she smothers it with butter, daubing it in dollops of delicious oily, fatty, crunchy peanut butter. Goes to bed and eats it all. Stomach full, bloated with fatty food, hunger pang satiated, at least for now, she lets the mint tea calm her back to sleep.
Soon, she must try to lose some of her repulsive fat, she really must.
The pale grey twilight fades into daylight streaming through the crack in the curtains to dance on her eyelids. She opens her eyes, rolls on her side, gropes for the alarm clock and checks the time: almost seven. She only managed three hours sleep. Gail said it’s imperative that she gets a restful night’s sleep, an absolute minimum of eight hours every night if she is to have the strength to lose her body fat.
Her bowel is blocked, heavy, swollen: the constipated effect of eating excessive amounts of fatty stodge in the middle of the night and drinking insufficient fluid. She tumbles out of bed, visits the toilet, strains, and strains. When she wipes herself clean, the tissue is streaked with bright scarlet oxygenated blood. Unable to stem the tears, she flushes the toilet, angrily slamming the cracked oaken lid closed, goes to the kitchenette and drinks a litre of water.
Utterly dejected, she surfs the internet until she finds a brutal crash starvation diet that promises to lose her a stone in weight in ten days.
This is useless, she thinks, I’ll last a day then I’ll start eating again. I won’t shed a single pound.
cure
At last, a ray of light. Inside the glossy pages of Elting and Meerton’s hyper-local monthly Vista magazine, beneath an advertisement for trusted ready-mix concrete, lurks a small ad for a remedy shop. Better still, the shop appears to specialize in common dietary challenges such as fat cutting elimination, obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, slimming, cholesterol cuts – and a new branch has just opened in Elting.
After a satisfying breakfast of pork sausages, baked beans, streaky bacon, fried bread, fried eggs and orange juice, she gets up, cleans her teeth, showers then dresses in her baggy cream sweatshirt with a strawberry motif, black pull-on cargo trousers, and trainers.
It is spitting sleet outside when she opens the curtains. Wearing her best danger red lightweight puffer jacket, she grabs her key and leaves. The cutting wind nips at her cheeks. The cul-de-sac is deserted. The remedy shop is a healthy fifteen minutes’ walk for her. God knows, she could do with the exercise, couldn’t she?
The shop reminds her of an olde-fashioned apothecary she visited with her mother when she was a little girl in a quaint picture-box village on the Suffolk coast. The walls are steeped to the ceiling with mahogany glass-fronted cabinets full of brown glass bottles with opaque stoppers, faded buff labels, glass phials, conical flasks, test tubes: a veritable laboratory for concocting cures.
In front of the nearest wall stretches a glass display counter with a single silver bell. The poker-faced shop assistant is slumped against it, her head propped up on her left arm, blunt fingernails scratching a red spot under her ear, wearing a pristine white lab coat unbuttoned at the front to show a dawn blue tee-shirt.
Vicki notices her sleeve is undone: the girl’s forearm is pale as goat’s milk, lightly freckled, and she has high cheekbones. Her auburn hair is tied back off her face in an attractive tight plait which tumbles out of sight down her back. The girl is disinterested in her. So, she rings the service bell.
‘There’s no need for that,’ the girl barks in a taut accent without adjusting her posture, ‘Yes? Can I help you?’
‘I feel really tired. My back hurts bad. I sweat hard. I eat too much. I’m fat. I want to lose weight.’
The girl shakes her head, at her, vigorously, ‘I do not find you fat. I do not think you need to lose fat. If you ask me, you have a gut figure.’
‘You mean good.’
‘I meant gut.’
Vicki looks round the empty shop searching for a good excuse, ‘I want to look good for the beach.’
The girl’s face tans at the mention of the word beach, ‘Ah, which beach do you wish to look good for?’
‘It’s a secret.’
‘Ach, I am good at keeping secrets. I promise not to tell no-one. Cross my part and hope to die.’
‘Heart,’ says Vicki correcting her, annoyed at her appalling grammar, ‘I didn’t come here to chat. I need a drug to stop me feeling hungry all the time and eating too much. What do you suggest?’
‘I am sorry. I am new to this country. No-one ever speaks to me like you are. Is it my accent?’
‘If you ask me, I think you have a lovely accent.’
‘Thank you for being so kind to me. Have you tried my hand-made stodge?’
Vicki hasn’t tried it, ‘No, what’s stodge?’
‘Stodge is thick food rich in carbs that is heavy and filling and stops you feeling hungry. You take it three times a day: soon as you wake in the morning, instead of lunch, und when you go to bed. Would you like me to stir one up for you?’
The girl is wearing her gold-effect name badge: Rahel. It isn’t a name Vicki is familiar with. She asks her what it means in English.
‘It means Rachel.’
‘Rachel, that’s a lovely name,’ lovely just like you, she thinks, then concentrates, ‘Yes, I would.’
Rahel turns her back on her and opens the nearest cabinet. Her beautiful handwoven plait stretches as far as her waist ending in a scruffy bit which resembles the end of a horse’s skirt. She takes out some glass bottles, pausing to question herself.
‘Now, which is the best for her? Ja, this is best,’ then she turns to face her only customer today, smiling proudly, ‘I have it here for you. Wait, please.’
Vicki giggles childishly: Rahel is so strict! She wonders how the auburn girl would look dressed in a black leather leotard wielding a whip on her back, letting her mind play its creepy dark games.
Out loud she says, ‘It’s alright, take your time. I’m not going anywhere. I live near here,’ and tells her, her name.
‘I like that name, Vicki,’ Rahel says, musing to herself as she assembles the bottles on the counter.
She disappears in a narrow recess at the far end of the shop, returning several minutes later dressed in an antiquated smock and white lace cap. A curled strand of auburn hair hangs loosely to one side of her face where she didn’t pin it back properly, giving her an austere, harsh, disciplined appearance.
Rahel is carrying a conical flask with a grey stopper, a flat round-bottomed flask, like the one she used for practical chemistry at school, and an indescribable glass apparatus with a teapot spout, a vent and tubes sticking out of the top. Serious, sombre, she pours liquid from the bottles into and out of the flasks, reaching under the counter to take out a large white lidded plastic pot of powder, adds the powder and shakes it into a stodge which she ladles into the pot. Stodge stirred she screws on a scarlet plastic lid then passes the gruel to her only customer wrapped in a brown paper bag.
‘There,’ she sighs, ‘Take six scoops three times a day in place of meals. That is ten pounds. Have a gut holiday.’
Vicki pays by card, thanks Rahel, promises to call in to see her sometime soon then steps out into the sleet. The weather has turned bitterly cold. She zips up her puffer jacket as high as her neck, blinking flittering flakes off her eyelids, rubbing her hands. She feels the cold, the cold makes her feel hungry.
She curses herself, ‘Why didn’t you put on warmer clothes and gloves, stupid girl?’ then she jogs home to keep warm.
As soon as she has dried her hair and changed into a warm lemon sweater and cord joggers, she sprints to the kitchen, unwraps the pot, unscrews the lid, extracts its pink plastic measuring scoop and dispenses six heaps of stodge into a cereal bowl. She raises the first spoon to her lips, opens her mouth wide and slides it inside. The slime tastes disgusting, like rancid fat. Retching, she spits the masticated mess out into the sink, rinses her mouth with strong peppermint mouthwash, then brushes her teeth. The stodge she unceremoniously consigns to a waste sack without bothering to recycle its container.
She reaches for the bar of dark cooking chocolate she keeps hidden from view on the top shelf of her kitchen cupboard for her depressing, sad winter moments.
In her last ditch attempt at losing fat, she joins the local gym and signs up for a half-hour personal fitness session with Keira Marsh, a proven specialist in women’s fat reduction who uses intensive exercise regimes as her preferred method for restoring the female’s muscles, strength and vitality.
habit
The next day is an extremely mild one for the depths of winter, the communal sports centre is an easy walk from home. So, she opts for her black cotton tummy control secret shaping vest, rubber-stretch knee-length shorts and her soft cotton socks. The plate glass door swings open toward her automatically. Although it isn’t raining, she still wipes her feet on the grey polymer commercial mat, out of habit.
Vicki sees two wall-mounted moulded plasma screens on her immediate left. Walks over. Reads one. It tells her to tap the screen before she scans her members key fob using the concealed infra-red light. She does all that, taps gym, taps exit, smiles hard at the receptionist with caramel hair in mouse bunches, who is busy blushing her face and doing her nails, sanitizes her hands with froth foam then presses her fob against an infra-red light at the gym entrance. It refuses to open.
She about-turns to face the receptionist who is wearing a Bee badge, ‘I can’t get the door to open?’
‘That’s because you didn’t tap the screen hard enough. Here, watch me do it for you,’ Bee ceases to apply her blusher and stands, revealing her sensational pink party frock and perfect complexion.
She has never met anyone so immaculately made-up. The girl’s face resembles a painted puppet’s with smooth velvet skin, charcoal eyebrows painted over radioactive pink eyelids, and prominent false lashes, a tiny beauty mole, diamond ear conches, and a miniscule pearl stud in her left nostril. But it’s the lurid, squashed, ripe plum flesh smeared over her fat lips, that impresses her the most.
‘Where did you get that lipstick?’ she asks her, enthusing, ‘It looks so awesome and it’s so you?’
Bee dips her hand inside her dress pocket and draws out a thick crimson roll-on, ‘Do you really think so? It’s swollen gland by penis. Stunning isn’t it?’ she holds the tube up to her face showing off the red-faced faerie tattoo on her left wrist, ‘Mm, suits your pale skin, you should try it maybe.’
Before Vicki can ask why she is dressed as a fairytale princess, she takes her fob, prances across to the check-in in her wobbly red stilettoes, steadies herself, and brings her fist down on the screen.
‘Thanks,’ she says, receiving the fob back as she approaches the glass gym door, ‘Appreciated.’
‘Don’t mention it. Must go. My baby’s at a unicorn party. I’m meant to be her dream fairy tonight. In you go. Have a good thrash. Most of all have fun. Live your life to the full. Before it’s too late.’
The gym door clicks and opens. Her confidence renewed, uplifted by Bee’s remarkable cosmetic surgery and positive can-do attitude, she ventures inside. Inside, the gym is heaving with sweating young men punishing their muscular physiques with weights in strength zone, cycling themselves into frenzies in cardio or posturing, mostly for her attention, on the grey rubber mats in core.
It comes as no surprise to her when the sad dull boys heads swivel to appreciate her breasts and rear. After all, she is the only girl present in the gym. Apart from the fit girl sitting on the grubby black rubber box in stretch zone.
‘Ignore them, they’ll soon leave you alone,’ the girl says, patting her box, ‘Hey, I’m Keira. You must be the girl who wants to lose all her fat.’
‘Well, are you?’ she adds.
‘My name’s Vicki.’
‘Sorry, I meant Vicki.’
‘Come and sit with me, then.’
Vicki joins her trainer on the box. Their legs touch. It’s the first time she has touched anyone in weeks. Touching the girl’s legs feels wonderful. Her body feels lovely and warming close up and she seems open to her feelings.
‘Open your heart to me. Tell me how you feel. Go on, be honest with yourself. I want to hear your heart speak.’
‘If I’m honest, I feel really tired? My back hurts, bad. I sweat, hard. I’m fat. I want to lose weight?’
‘I can change your life,’ says the shame-faced ginger-red elfin beauty with a lilting hint of brogue.
Keira’s vibrant, healthy, and attractive. Her breasts are round, pale, like over-cooked dumplings, kids tennis balls. Great abs, too, pallid milk-white skin, cleft buttocks, lean, sinewy thighs: a body to die for. Vicki wants her for her dollish figure, her slender athletic limbs, her sleek, rakish torso.
Next day, she breezes into the gym in a cream hoodie, high impact sports bra and skin-tight fitness pants. Keira is busy playing on her rubber box, kicking her legs, clutching a notepad. Before Vicki can speak, she points out a set of biometric weighing scales lying ominously on the fitted flatline dark grey sweat-impervious flooring.
‘Hey, let’s see how much you weigh, shall we?’ she says, encouragingly, as if this isn’t an ordeal.
Vicki takes off her hoodie, shoes and anklets and mounts the scales which flash up her red digital reading in kilos. Disturbed by the inflated figures, she asks what her weight is – in imperial pounds.
Keira hesitates before replying, ‘Like me to take off two pounds for your clothes?’
‘Just tell me how much, can you?’
‘One hundred and sixty pounds.’
Her vulnerable self-confidence evaporates with the shock, ‘What did you just say? How much?’
‘I said: one hundred and sixty pounds. Why, how much did you think you weighed?’
‘When I weighed myself, I was only a hundred and fifty-five. Can’t have put on five pounds in a week, can I?’
The waif rubs her small, blunt chin, and nods at her, painfully slowly, ‘Our scales never lie, Vicki.’
‘In that case, I need to lose a stone in three months.’
‘If you really want to lose that much weight there are changes you must make, like drinking three litres of water every day, working out three times a week, and keeping a daily food diary focusing on your total calorie intake, fat to calorie mix and protein to calorie ratio,’ advises Keira, expertly.
Vicki laces her shoes, tying them in double knots. Seems everything comes in threes with Keira. She asks if she can start at two litres of water, work her way up. Three litres does seem a lot. Keira listens to her intently, taking notes. The girl has this uncanny aura about her that instils confidence. In her heart, she feels she can lose all her fat, sees a shining light of hope at the end of her bleak tunnel of constant bellyache.
Motivated at last, she asks, ‘What does total calorie intake mean? What are fat and protein ratios?’
Keira tells her all will be revealed in a special email. If she’d like to put on her shoes and socks and follow her? For the next half hour, she is put on the treadmill, waggles battle ropes, works a twenty-kilo chess press, is taught how to leg curl, safely, at fifteen-kilos. Keira has her perform sit ups. Forces her to mountain climb the box. Once Vicki is exhausted, they lie flat on their rubber mats intimately close to one another like lovers and stretch. She turns her head to face the girl and delivers her shocking sting in the tail: ‘I must achieve my fat loss in three months. If I fail, I’ll complain to the management about your service.’
Keira stares at her in disbelief, inhaling deeply, squealing, ‘Is this meant to be some kind of joke?’
She studies her bare feet ashamed of herself for what she just said, struggling to climb off the mat.
‘I’d rather you didn’t make sick jokes, threatening me like that,’ the girl chides, acid in her voice.
Vicki pulls on her socks, shoes, and gets up off of the mat, ‘I wouldn’t dream of threatening you.’
She sanitizes her hands and promptly leaves stretch zone. Mind-in-a-muddle, she presses the red exit button and walks out the door. The brat managed to put on a brave smile but didn’t hide her upset. Vicki tries to shake her smarting face off of her mind. She’s fallen madly in love with Keira already, if truth be told, and just can’t wait to see her again.
