Fat Chance

by Nick Spalding

  The combination of caffeine and alcohol mixes nicely in the speech centre of my brain and I spend thirty minutes verbally bashing my extended family over the head with a series of conversation topics I can barely recall now.

  From what I remember, I started off educating them about how much sugar there is in wine, then I moved on to how much sugar there is in cheese. Then I moved on to a story I’d read about a chair made of cheese, and then I moved on to a story I’d read about a chair made of beer cans. Then I moved on to how saying ‘beer can’ sounds like you’re saying bacon in a Jamaican accent, then I moved on to how Zoe and I want a holiday in the Caribbean—or maybe the Seychelles, or maybe Key West, or maybe China . . .

  The rest is a bit of a blur, but by the time Zoe ushers me out into the kitchen to help her dish out the dinner, I have for some reason started singing the Ying Tong song, as made famous by The Goons.

  ‘Ying tong, ying tong, ying tong, ying tong, ying tong tiddle-eye poh,’ I merrily sing as I vibrate my way across the lounge with my incredibly irate wife.

  ‘Will you stop it!’ she hisses at me once we’re out of her parents’ eye-line.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘You’re acting like a drug addict. They probably think you’re really on cocaine, not just drinking too much bloody coffee.’

  ‘Well, you know technically, the original Coca-Cola drink did have cocaine in it, I think, so I guess that’s probably where the name comes from, so—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  I do as I’m bid, though it takes a great deal of effort.

  I manage to keep my verbal diarrhoea under control while Zoe and I prepare the meal. By the time we sit down to eat the food, though, I’m back on the babble train.

  It would be fine if I had a decent amount of food to stuff in my gob and keep me quiet, but I wolf down the small steak in about ten seconds flat, leaving me plenty of time to flap my lips while my wife and her parents try their best to enjoy their meals, with my incessant talking as an unwanted accompaniment.

  Things reach their final and shocking denouement as Alan and Babs finish off the crème brûlée Zoe had made especially for them.

  ‘Crème brûlée is a fascinating pudding,’ I jabber. ‘Caramelising the sugar properly is particularly difficult and takes a great deal of skill. Zoe’s very good at it now, but you should have seen some of the disasters she’s come up with in the past. Oh my, yes. Many times I’ve stood with her in the kitchen while she’s attempted another batch. The smell of burnt sugar really is quite horrible, I think. Our extractor fan could barely cope with it. Still, she’s got it down to a fine art now, as you can probably tell from the ones you’re eating. She’s a very talented cook, is your daughter. Much better than me, anyway. I’m sure she probably gets it from you, Barbara. I always look forward to coming round to you for a meal. She’s certainly a chip off the old—’

  ‘Shut up, Greg,’ Barbara says in a small, exasperated voice.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Be quiet. Please, please be bloody quiet, just for a moment.’

  I’m stunned. Barbara is usually a very polite, gentle woman. All that obsessive compulsive stuff leads to the kind of temperament ill-suited to confrontation.

  ‘I’m sorry, Barbara,’ I apologise. ‘I was only complimenting you on your cooking. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be offended by that. Mind you, it’s strange what some people can be offended by these days. I was watching the news the other day and there was this woman on there who was up in arms about something on the BBC last week. A show about religion it was. She was really unhappy about—’

  ‘Can’t you just stop talking?’ Alan interjects. ‘We’ve hardly been able to get a word in all evening!’

  ‘Haven’t you? Really? I thought we’d been having a lovely conversation tonight. After all, we’ve talked about cheese, and the Chinese, and The Goons, and beer cans, and China. Did I already say China? Well, we’ve definitely talked about it . . .’

  I can’t stop myself. I am simply unable to prevent words from spilling out of my big fat mouth at an absurd rate of knots.

  I’m also aware of a thunderous headache starting to form at the back of my skull.

  ‘Greg!’ Zoe snaps. ‘For God’s sake go and calm down upstairs!’

  And so we have the final ignominy.

  I have been ordered to go up to my room like a badly behaved child.

  Alan and Barbara are silent as I push my chair back and stand. I start to apologise for talking at them so much, but I pause with my mouth half open. If I start speaking again now I’m likely to launch into yet another ramble and make things even worse.

  I bend down and give Zoe a kiss on her red forehead before backing away from the table and leaving the lounge.

  As I climb the stairs I can hear Zoe giving her parents the apology and explanation I was unable to provide. ‘. . . it’s the caffeine,’ she is saying. ‘He’s just not used to it. It’s like giving too much sugar to a five-year-old.’

  I close the bedroom door for fear of hearing any more. The humiliation of it would be too much to bear.

  I spend the next hour or so jiggling around the bedroom until I hear Zoe call up to me that her parents are leaving.

  Like the aforementioned badly behaved child, I slope back down the stairs with my head hanging.

  ‘I’m sorry I was so silly,’ I tell Barbara and Alan as they put on their coats.

  Babs puts a conciliatory hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s alright, Greg. Zoe explained how much of that stuff you’ve been drinking because of the diet.’

  ‘You do appear to have lost a lot of weight, though,’ Alan remarks, which puts a smile on my face for the first time since I was banished to the top floor.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ I say. ‘I’m so pleased you’ve noticed. After all, that’s why I’m on the diet. There wouldn’t be much point in drinking all that coffee if I didn’t lose any weight, eh? No, no. It would be a complete waste of time. It’s not that bad a diet, really. I haven’t felt all that hungry in days. Which is surprising for me, because the amount of food I used to pack away would suggest that I really would miss it more than I have. I guess coffee must be something of an appetite suppressant. Bit like cigarettes, I suppose. Not that I’d ever try cigarettes as a way to lose weight. I mean, all you’d be doing then is swapping one bad thing for—’

  ‘Greg!’ Zoe snaps.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’

  I clamp my lips shut and give the parents-in-law a final goodbye that consists largely of hand gestures. Once Zoe closes the front door on them, I start chewing on one knuckle, knowing that the next few minutes of my life are going to be all about getting told off.

  ‘Well, thank you, Speedy Gonzales,’ Zoe begins. ‘Here I am trying to convince our loved ones that these diets are worth all the time and effort and you start acting like a heroin junkie.’ I open my mouth to respond. ‘Don’t say anything!’ Zoe barks, and slaps my arm. ‘Just keep your mouth shut and listen. God knows, your jaw could probably do with a rest. It’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen off with all that motor-mouthing.’

  And so, Gregory Milton’s evening comes to an end with having a stern finger pointed at him, and the kind of verbal abuse no man with a caffeine addiction should have to suffer.

  That’s a complete lie. My evening does not come to an end at that point at all, given how much coffee I’ve drunk throughout the day.

  My evening actually comes to an end at about three in the morning, a good four hours after Zoe has gone to bed.

  I spend most of that time shaking in the corner of the living room, flicking the TV repeatedly between a ‘Location, Location, Location’ marathon, and four episodes of ‘Australian MasterChef,’ both at a very low volume.

  By the time I feel tired enough to go up to bed, I could easily have told you how long you need to cook a three-bed semi i
n the Lake District to get the right consistency, and exactly how large a mortgage you should be paying on a chocolate and maraschino cake with excellent views of Windermere.

  . . . or something like that anyway. By this time my brain is crashing from the caffeine high and I may have become a little confused.

  I climb out of bed the next day at about ten fifteen. My eyes are glued shut for a good twenty minutes after that.

  I stumble into the kitchen and immediately start looking for the Kenco Finest.

  ‘Oh no you bloody don’t, pal!’ Zoe snaps at me. ‘You’re not drinking another cup of that stuff unless it’s decaf.’

  ‘But the diet . . .’

  ‘Fuck the diet! Have some orange juice and we’ll buy a jar of caffeine-free coffee later.’

  Which, when you think about it, is something I should probably have done at least three days ago.

  The change to decaf is painful. Very, very painful.

  Withdrawing from the chemical I’ve become so quickly dependent on is a trial I never intend to repeat. Within forty-eight hours I am lethargic, confused, irritable, and suffering from the worst constipation of my life.

  It’s now been five days since I last had any caffeine, and I only took my first decent crap this morning. It was like a war zone down there.

  I’m still bloody tetchy, and have been snappy with everyone I’ve come into contact with.

  Still, better I walk around like a bear with a sore head, and not the Tasmanian Devil. I may have been pretty rude to people over the past few days during my withdrawal, but at least I haven’t told them my entire life story in five minutes while showering them with spittle.

  I have to confess that I just couldn’t take on the Israeli Army Diet after my experience with the Russian Air Force equivalent. It called for even more coffee consumption, and even less food.

  I just didn’t think my brain or my bowels could take it.

  There’s a very good reason why diets like these don’t become more popular in the mainstream. It is because they are incredibly stupid. Stupid and highly detrimental to your well-being.

  A reliance on coffee and very little else may be good for members of the Russian and Israeli armed forces, but for a fat middle-aged bloke in England they are a distinct no-no.

  I am absolutely done with these diets.

  I may eat my words and live to regret this decision if we’re ever invaded by hordes of screaming Chechnyans and grenade-flinging Arabs, but it’s a chance I am most definitely willing to take.

  ZOE’S WEIGHT LOSS DIARY

  Tuesday, June 10th

  12 stone, 5 pounds (2 stone, 2 pounds lost)

  I can’t believe we’ve been at this for three months now. Time seems to be slipping away as fast as the inches around my waist. Despite the horrors of the cabbage soup diet, and some of the other methods of weight loss I’m employing (which I can’t bring myself to write about here yet; it’s too disturbing to my fragile mental state. Check back with me when I’m not so calorie starved) I’m managing to just about maintain my sanity.

  I think I’ve reached the stage where both my body and mind are getting used to the massive change in lifestyle . . . but it’s touch and go sometimes. Yesterday, for instance, I spent a good twenty minutes fantasising about going for a swim in a lake of double cream. At the centre of the lake was an island made of Jamaican ginger cake. The swimming wasn’t easy—double cream is quite thick, after all—but I managed to make the going a bit easier by opening my mouth and eating as much of it as possible.

  When a telephone call snapped me out of the fantasy, I was miserable for the rest of the afternoon. I would quite happily have lived the rest of my life out on that brown squidgy island.

  To make myself feel better, I picked up some holiday brochures for Jamaica on the way home from work. It looks like a nice place, but the sea is far too blue, not at all double cream like, and the island itself doesn’t look edible in the slightest.

  . . . As I say, it’s touch and go sometimes.

  I tell you one thing all this dieting is definitely doing, though.

  It’s making me horny.

  Nymphomaniac levels of horny.

  I’ve now lost two stone, Greg’s dropped over two and half, and by golly, that collective weight loss is enough to set a woman’s thoughts to all kinds of dirt.

  I never realised that going on a strict diet could be such a kick-start to your libido.

  Before the competition started, my sex drive was well and truly in the doldrums, and to be honest, our unhealthy lifestyles have put the dampers on our bedroom activities for the past few years.

  When Greg and I first met at college we were, and I’ll put this as delicately as my near-constant state of sexual arousal will let me, fucking all the time and absolutely everywhere.

  I was nine stone and fit as a fiddle. Greg was thirteen stone—most of which was muscle thanks to all the rugby he played.

  Frankly, we were both beautiful and we knew it.

  We met when we were both eighteen years old, and high on being young and stupid. The head of the college rugby team wanted me to model a ladies’ version of the new kit he’d just wasted most of the sport department’s budget on, and I was more than happy to oblige given that the hundred pounds he’d promised me would set me up nicely for clubbing at the weekend. The photo shoot was arranged with me alongside one of the rugby team modelling the men’s version of the kit. The guy chosen to do this was Gregory Milton.

  Gorgeous, gorgeous Gregory Milton.

  I still remember to this day the sharp bolt of electricity that passed through my whole body when I saw him for the first time.

  I was sitting on a bench in the sports hall, pulling up the long white socks that came as part of the kit, when I looked up and saw him walk in through the double doors across the hall from me. Thankfully he wasn’t high on painkillers that day, so didn’t come stumbling in like a drunkard. No, back then Greg Milton strode everywhere with a confidence and poise that was enough to make this girl’s heart thump very hard indeed.

  He was carrying a rugby ball, casually tossing it in the air and catching it again without even looking. By the time he’d made it across to where the camera was being set up for the shoot, I was having trouble taking my eyes off him.

  It later transpired that he felt the same way. ‘The way you were playing with those long socks,’ he would tell me weeks later, ‘and the tight blue shorts? It was a miracle I didn’t trip over my own penis.’

  The photo shoot was conducted by Lionel, one of the photography department lecturers. Lionel was the kind of man who really shouldn’t be let near a telephoto lens—especially when around other human beings. He had a reputation for being a right pervert.

  Legend had it that his house was full of black and white photographic ‘art’ featuring young women in a variety of compromising positions. Legend also had it that he was on the registered sex offenders list, but that kind of rumour springs up very easily and is always almost impossible to verify.

  The way Lionel had me seductively posed on and around Greg during the photo shoot gave me the distinct impression that there was something funny going on with him, though, I can tell you that.

  ‘Now, Zoe, why don’t you wrap your hands around Greg’s bicep and press yourself up against him?’ Lionel suggested.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I think that would look lovely.’ He didn’t quite wipe the dribble from his lips, but he was close, I could tell.

  Now, had Greg not been six foot of walking sex I wouldn’t have gone along with Lionel’s request. As it was, I gave my future husband a speculative look and moved a bit closer to him. ‘You okay with this?’ I asked him.

  Greg swallowed hard. ‘Er, I think so. If Lionel reckons it’ll look okay.’

  ‘I’m sure it will.’

  I cou
ldn’t actually give a toss what it looked like, of course. I just wanted a grope.

  I snaked my arms around Greg’s hard bicep, pressed myself up against him, turned to the camera, and smiled.

  Greg smelled absolutely amazing and it took all my self-control not to fall on the floor in a gooey mess. A sight like that wouldn’t have made a particularly good photo.

  ‘Now, I think you should stand in front of Greg and hold his ball,’ Lionel instructed me.

  I assumed Lionel was referring to the rugby ball Greg had brought along, though at this point I think I would have happily stuck my hand down his shorts and had a good old rummage.

  ‘Put your arms around her, please,’ Lionel said to Greg as I got into position.

  I felt his strong arms gently rest across my shoulders and the breath was sucked right out of my body. I nearly dropped the bloody rugby ball.

  By the time Lionel finally wrapped up the photo shoot I was so aroused it was a miracle I didn’t rape poor old Gregory Milton right there and then on the sports hall floor.

  ‘Thanks for doing this,’ he said to me as we walked back towards the changing rooms. ‘Selling these kits at the games was my idea and this will really help flog a few, with any luck.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘You certainly look a lot better in it than I do,’ he said awkwardly as we reached the two separate doors leading to each changing room.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I replied. ‘You look pretty good in it, I reckon.’

  The hormones were so thick between us by now you could almost see them floating in mid-air.

  Greg licked his lips. I knew what was coming.

  ‘Are you doing anything now?’ he asked, ‘I mean, would you like to maybe get a coffee with me in the canteen?’

  Okay, so it wasn’t exactly an invitation to join him at the Ritz, but I was eighteen and a coffee in the canteen sounded wonderful.

  ‘Sure. That’d be nice. Meet you on the other side?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Great. That’d be great. Great.’