Waiting for Kate Bush (3 page)

“Sounds a wicked idea to me,” Gilmour admitted. But Duncan said they’d promised their mum. When I pointed out that she didn’t have to know, he actually made eye contact. His expression combined pity and contempt. I wanted to point out that not all of us have the great advantage of growing up in a world in which one’s expected to keep his word. I wanted to burst into tears.

“Blimey,” said Gilmour, astonished, for a moment, out of his sarcastic Celticness. A trio of big fellows in hospital whites were helping a gigantic pale whale of a woman out of their own van. She’d turned an alarming shade of pink from the exertion. As they unfolded a gurney and rolled her onto it, Gilmour giggled. “I’ll bet she’s got her own bloody postal code.”

“And I,” his brother snapped, “think maybe you should plug up your cakehole.” I wanted to burst into tears.

The barmaid pointed out the corner of the nearly deserted pub in which the meeting would take place. It took nearly every second of the 12 minutes we were early for the brothers to get me over there and into a chair. They became ever more antagonistic. “How about we pick up the bloody pace a bit, gov?” Gilmour wondered sarcastically at one point as I stood there gasping, not wanting to fall to the ground (because it might take the rest of the day to get me back on my feet), but feeling too weak not to. I half wanted to see how he’d like my falling on him. “He’s doing the best he can,” said Duncan, a grown child with his mum in his eyes, his expression very much as his mum’s had been the night she’d learned why I wasn’t coming down for meals.
The two brothers’ animosity must have gone way back, but I certainly wasn’t doing much to reduce it.

People think of the fat as jolly, but this lot was anything but. And the transplanted Yorkshireman moderator, Graham, with a florid complexion and the young Bryan Ferry’s suggestively lank black hair, was coy into the bargain. At first sight of me, what he said was, “This is Overeaters Anonymous, for people who have issues with food. Can I help?”

“I certainly hope so,” I blurted, too nervous not to try too hard. “Nothing else has worked, none of the diets, none of the medications, not even the fasting.” The four already there, including the pink whale from the car park, stopped their conversation. They stared at me in silence. I felt humid with embarrassment.

“Mr. Herskovits has a problem with his weight,” the blessed kindly Duncan interjected. Gilmour snorted. One of the women harrumphed. Humider and humider. Now it was Graham’s expression that was very closely akin to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s on my initial mention of the fire brigade and their crane. “Well, in that case,” he said, “please do have a seat.”

If looks could kill, I’d have been dead before I took three steps. I felt as though back in junior high school physical education. From my first exposure to them, I adored sports, even though I was rotten at all of them. But I detested gymnastics in general and the pole climb in particular. We boys were forever being timed climbing three metal poles in a big sandpit, presumably to gauge our fitness. I was very fit, from playing baseball and football and basketball and tennis and anything else I could persuade anyone to play with me, but had no aptitude whatever for the pole. Other boys shot up it, their new adolescent biceps bulging, their feet hardly touching the bloody thing. I could climb a rope because I could hold it between my feet. But the pole just laughed at me, along with all of the other boys – save the gormless, misshapen few who shared my ineptitude.

In those days, I rode home on a school bus that let me out right in front of a liquor store whose stock of paperback novels depicting hard, bouffant-haired early-Sixties sexpots in sheath dresses slit up the sides drove me half mad with lust. “She was poured into her dress by women,” proclaimed the one I seem never to have forgotten, presumably about a model with Loose Morals, “… and pulled out of them by men!” How I ached for those women!

Had one of them been at the top of the pole topless, I still wouldn’t have been able to climb the bastard.

And the looks on the faces of The Boys Who Could as, after staring balefully at the pole until the sun-tanned sadist who was our instructor finally growled, “Either climb the son-of-a-bitch or go sit the fuck down,” I slinked back among my peers.

It was those walks from the infernal metal pole back to my place that I remembered too well as I waddled ponderously from Graham.

I could hear the laboured breathing of the most attractive of my fellow overeaters before I was within 10 feet of her. She was around 25, with gorgeous white skin, huge blue eyes and extraordinary thick cornsilk hair. If this girl had been told, “You’d be so gorgeous if only you’d lose … (your choice of weights),” once, she’d probably been told 10,000 times. If anything, she was even huger than the pink whale. And she was unmistakably suffering, consumed by self-loathing, terrified of the others, terrified of me, terrified by the thought of living another hour in her remarkable body. She visibly trembled at my approach. Tears raced down her globular cheeks. She whimpered between gasps.

All she had in common with the behemoth beside her was immensity. The behemoth’s skin and hair were those of one who eats nothing not deep-fried. She seemed to be sweating lard. She was around 40, with little piggy eyes, loose hanging blue flab, and teeth the colour of weak tea. She was as bold as Miss Cornsilk was timid. “Just what do you fucking imagine you’re bloody doing here?” she demanded when I managed to smile at her. The might-have-been writer in me thought she’d have been better off changing the order of
bloody
and
fucking
, saving the best for last.

“Crinolyn,” said the gigantic Afro-Caribbean woman beside her, “don’t. Please.”

But Crinolyn wasn’t having any of it. Her little piggy eyes seared my own corneas. “Fucking chubby chaser? Is that your game, you?”

A new arrival arrived, a huge young man as pretty in his own way as Miss Cornsilk, and as bloated. I realised I’d seen him on television. He’d had a very brief career as a singer, followed by an only slightly longer one as one of the celebrities on a series called
Lose It Or Die
, about morbidly obese H-list celebrities trying to learn to enjoy exercise. Apparently the group’s male sex symbol, he inspired a sharp intake of breath from one of the women behind me.

Crinolyn wasn’t distracted, though. “I asked you a question, mate,” she said, leaning over toward me. “What are you fucking doing here?”

“Crinolyn,” the huge black woman tried again.

“If you’re fine with our being infiltrated by chubby chasers,
Boopsie,” Crinolyn snarled at her, “my hat’s off to you. But I’m fucking not, am I?” She turned to me again. “I’m going to ask you one more time, mate. What’s your game?”

Everyone else had fallen silent. There was nowhere for me to hide. Even Gilmour, about to go out of the door, seemed to be waiting for my answer. My shirt was pasted to my back with sweat. I cleared my throat. “My game is trying to sort out a way to stop overeating myself into a state far past mere morbid obesity. I dare say it’s the same game as all of yours.”

You could have heard a feather drop onto a pile of gauze. All the overeaters looked at one another. Gilmour looked at Duncan and shook his head, smirking. It was I who was sweating lard now.

“Would you permit me to ask what your present weight is?” one of those behind me finally managed. The pink whale, the one from outside. I told her the truth. I told her that I hadn’t even bothered getting on a scale in months. I was blinded by my own sweat. “And you’ve not been to see a doctor, then?” I admitted I hadn’t.

“If he’s over 14 stone,” Crinolyn said, “the drinks are on me. For the rest of the bloody year.” No one laughed incredulously. It was my turn to wonder what their game was. Somebody cleared her throat. My mouth was the most arid place on earth.

“May I ask what you mean by chubby chaser?” I finally blurted, just to put the awful silence out of its misery.

“A normal-sized bloke who gets off on fat women,” Crinolyn said. “A victimiser. An exploiter of the misery of the defenceless. First cousin to a paedophile.”

Another mass sharp intake of breath. Then Boopsie: “Isn’t that a little harsh, Crinolyn?”

“Fuck off,” said Crinolyn. “No, I don’t think it’s harsh at all really. In her own way, somebody like Nicola is no more able to defend herself than a child would be.”

Squirming, the young one with the cornsilk hair moaned as though in agony. And then threw up, sparingly, on her own lap. Both Graham the moderator and the late arrival, the former pop star, quickly produced handkerchiefs. Propelled back into the room by some sixth sense, Duncan hurried over with one of his own. Miss Cornsilk –Nicola – wailed as they all had at her.

“Are you pleased with yourself, Crinolyn?” Boopsie demanded angrily.

“Don’t turn it on me, you, you fat black bitch,” Crinolyn snarled. “Don’t shoot the bloody messenger. If I’m the only one with the
danglies to object to this wanker’s being here, it’s still him you should be angry at, innit?” Duncan and Graham each took hold of one of Nicola’s wrists to keep her from trying to pull out handfuls of her own gorgeous hair. You could have heard her wailing in Finsbury Park.

Boopsie backed down. The siren that Nicola had become seemed to recede a bit. Her wailing became snivelling, and then sniffling. “What I would remind Crinolyn,” Graham said, each syllable dripping accusation, “is that one person’s fat isn’t necessarily another’s. OA doesn’t say you have to weigh such-and-such to benefit from the programme. The programme is for anybody who feels they weigh too much, whatever they weigh.”

“Good news for the chubby chasers,” Crinolyn said under her breath, but not far enough under it to keep everyone from hearing.

“While Nicola phones her sister to dash over with another skirt,” Graham said, not dignifying her with acknowledgement, “why don’t we all have a nice relaxing drink.”

“I don’t drink with paedophiles,” Crinolyn snarled, “and I don’t drink with chubby chasers either.” Her comment hung in the air like an awful smell. But then she smiled, exposing more of her awful teeth. “Unless they’re paying.”

God knows how, but she’d recognised me. “You’re the bloke from the Marcel Flynn pants adverts, innit? There was a time when I couldn’t turn on the bloody telly without having to look at your bloody six-pack. I reckon you must have a bob or two.”

“You were the Marcel Flynn pants bloke?” Boopsie marvelled. “Fantastic. I had mates with your photo on their bedroom walls.” It turned out she was a model in her own right. She’d modelled BHS’s new line of active sportswear for BBWs. British-born women? I had no idea what she meant, but didn’t want to appear stupid. The had-been pop star who’d arrived late helped out. “Big beautiful women,” he said, offering me his hand, with its incongruously long, narrow fingers. “Jez E. Bell.”

I bought a round of drinks and brought them back to where the overeaters, knowing they’d never get round a table, had made a semicircle of their chairs. It was actually fairly jolly. Hermione, the pink whale, turned out to be a well-known former restaurant critic turned travel writer. Having got too big for all coaches and most airlines, she now confined herself to writing about cruises. She knew that, if she didn’t do something about her weight, she’d be reduced to living off the royalties from her several books, as younger, hungrier, slimmer writers would supplant her. What she’d done recently about her weight
was gain two stone. “I just don’t seem to be able to help myself,” she said. The others murmured their assent.

She told Jez that he’d been a hero to her two daughters while competing in the first edition of the notorious televised singing competition
Megastar
, in which he’d been the only non-svelte semi-finalist. Hermione’s daughters weren’t fat themselves, but their classmates tormented them because their mum was fat, the thought of which coaxed tears out of her eyes. Boopsie kindly touched her hand, but her kindness made matters worse.

“I wish I could have won for them,” Jez said, “for them and all the other fat kids and slim kids of fat parents.”

“Fat bloody chance,” said Crinolyn, already glaring at the bottom of her pint glass. “As though the thin world’s ever going to give any of us a fighting chance.”

“It doesn’t serve us to buy into the victim mentality,” Graham said. It seemed very much the sort of thing one in his position would say. “I think they’d have been quite happy if Jez had won. Would have shown how broad-minded and tolerant they were. The simple fact is that he wasn’t the best singer, not by miles.”

“No?” said Jez, the blood rushing to his huge round face. “Maybe you’d like to tell us who was better, at least in your expert fucking opinion.” He tried to get to his feet. It was easier said than done.

It was Graham’s turn to redden. “The one who won, the one who turned out to be a bender. And the other one, the cute one with the cleft palate. And at least two of the girls as well.”

“Bollocks,” Jez snapped. If either of them had been able to get up, blows would surely have been thrown. “I could outsing the lot.”

“Can we have even one meeting without the two of you having a go at each other?” Crinolyn interjected. “Just fucking one?” She handed Graham her empty glass. “Same again. And some crisps. Three bags, please. They’re so small nowadays.”

Graham waddled dutifully to the bar. The still-breathless Jez mopped himself with a serviette. Poor Nicola Cornsilk appeared, in a fresh skirt and an expression of profound dread, and made her way over to us. “Look at how lovely you’re looking now,” Boopsie exulted, and poor Nicola turned the deepest red of the day.

I tried to make small talk. I asked Graham what work he did. He worked only a month of every year, as a department store Santa Claus. But he thought the approaching Christmas might be his last. “It’s a younger man’s game. There are only so many greedy little brats’ unreasonable demands a geezer can say
ho ho ho
to in one lifetime.
More and more, I find myself wanting to sit on one of the little buggers and feel their little femurs and what-not snapping beneath me.”

That took the small smile off poor Nicola’s face. Graham claimed he’d only been joking, but he was obviously lying. And such a person standing between me and almost certain death from overeating!