Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘… about a million times brighter than me …’

  No. It isn’t so. His green eyes clear and look at her. He isn’t smiling, but his face brims with willingness to smile. He’s waiting for her to tuck up her feet under the T-shirt and sit facing him on the other end of the bed. She is studying Baudelaire and he likes her to recite the poems to him in French. He dropped French way back, when he was fourteen. There didn’t seem any point in his going on, all the teachers had agreed. Even the private tutor his mother got hold of didn’t do the trick. It was just like eating something that disagreed with him. But Ulli knows that put Jorma in a café in a little French seaside town where they don’t speak a word of any other language, and he’d come back half an hour later knowing that there’s a little beach near by you can get to if you go round the rocks at low tide – it’s always deserted and you can swim with nothing on …

  ‘J’aime de vos longs yeux la lumière verdâdre …’

  she begins. He nods and closes his eyes.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it means?’ she asks.

  ‘Not really. It’s the sound I like. The sound of your voice. You know, I used to hate French at school, but it’s nice when you speak it.’

  ‘Don’t you wish we could go there? To France, I mean?’

  ‘No, why? I like this.’

  ‘Do you? What about this?’

  She puts out a foot and stirs his ribs.

  ‘Listen. Don’t go falling asleep again. Listen to this one and tell me if it doesn’t make you want to go far away, as far away as you possibly can.

  ‘Mon enfant, ma soeur

  Songe à la douceur

  D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble …’

  ‘I suppose it might, if I could understand it,’ says Jorma. ‘Was there something about a sister? J’ai une soeur et un frère. My tutor was always on at me to say that for some reason. Why is it that when you’re learning a foreign language, you always have to tell lies?’

  He catches hold of her foot and holds it for a moment, looking at the structure of her toes and the tan marks from her sandals. They’re still there, the marks of last summer’s sun, even after the long winter when her foot’s been sheathed in her brown leather boots with their sheepskin lining. At this time of year Ulli finds it hard to remember what sun feels like on bare skin. It’s mid-April. Two weeks now since she stopped being a virgin. Funny how often she’s thought of it that way, since it happened. She can’t remember thinking of herself as a virgin beforehand. But now she thinks of it and says it over and over in her mind, in the long quiet sunlit classroom during her Maths test, or when she’s gulping down coffee before she catches the bus to school. The word feels like a splinter deep inside her, not a splinter of ice but something quick and hot and alive. She’s getting to love the word virgin. Virgin. Non-virgin.

  Words in a changing-room:

  ‘Technically, I’m sure I’m not a virgin any more.’

  ‘No, it’s all right if you do that. You’re still a virgin really. Otherwise nobody’d be a virgin if they used tampons, would they?’

  ‘My mother still won’t let me use tampons. She says they give you cancer.’

  My child my sister …

  Jorma gives the foot back to her and says, ‘Come back to bed.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m starving.’

  ‘Poke around under the bed. There might be some biscuits. Jussi’s always leaving stuff around.’

  Jorma puts his lips against the inside of her shoulder, just above the crease of her armpit. He kisses and sips.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ he says, ‘if a sort of dew came out all over you. Ulli-dew.’

  ‘Do you know, some people rub margarine all over themselves when they’re in bed together,’ says Ulli. ‘I just can’t see why they do it, can you?’

  ‘There’s some massage oil in Mummy’s bathroom. But I think that’s for older people. You know. Their skin’s not as nice as yours.’

  ‘What does it taste of?’

  ‘Mmm. I don’t know really. Not anything sweet. More like moss, I think.’

  ‘Moss!’

  ‘Mm. More or less. But that’s not quite right. It’s a bit almondy as well. You know, I could tell it was you anywhere. Even if I had my eyes shut and you were in a room with twenty other people.’

  ‘And you went round and licked them all.’

  Jorma’s lips move up the shallow curve of Ulli’s right breast. She tenses and pulls away from him a little. He looks up. She sees him like a diver coming up out of deep water, his face pale, the pupils of his eyes shrinking as she looks at them.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Ulli. ‘It wasn’t anything really, it’s only … I wish my breasts were bigger.’

  She’s never said this to anyone. At school people envy her, or say that they do, because she’s slim and can eat what she likes without getting fat. Girls with big breasts hate sports. Their breasts jounce under their light T-shirts and their soft thighs chafe in their shorts. Ulli thinks they look beautiful in the showers, but they’d never believe it.

  ‘But you wouldn’t look right if they were,’ Jorma says, tracing the line of her breast. Her nipple stiffens. ‘Look, the way you are, you balance.’

  We have a little sister, she has no breasts.

  What shall we do for our sister

  on the day she is spoken for?

  In Ulli’s Bible the Song of Songs is headed over each column of verse:

  THE CHURCH PROFESSES HER FAITH: BEAUTY OF THE CHURCH: CHRIST AWAKENS THE CHURCH. She’d turned over the pages one day, reading the headings, then her eyes had fallen on the words below them. It was a like a punch in the stomach. She had no breath. She could hear the voices speaking and answering one another, as alive as herself, wanting what she wanted.

  Now she soaks in what Jorma’s just said. She won’t think of it now. She’ll save it for later on, as she’s saved the word virgin, to think about when she’s alone.

  Look, the way you are, you balance.

  The light of a midsummer dawn lies across the bathroom. It breaks on the panel of sea-green glass Mother bought for Pappy on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Thick sea-green glass with a pattern in it which varies according to where you stand. Ulli was six that year. Mother had told her in secret a few days beforehand, and had shown her the pane of glass, unwrapping a corner of the padded wrapping in its presentation box. The next morning Pappy was shaving and Ulli was watching his face in the mirror when a longing to tell him what his present was began to swell in her until it was so sweet and powerful that her mouth was watering with the words that she knew and he did not. Nothing else mattered. Watching in the mirror she steered mirror-Ulli and mirror-Pappy until they were touching, then she whispered the secret into his elbow.

  And after all that Pappy had fitted the pane of glass into the bathroom window, which wasn’t at all what Mother was hoping for. She wanted it to be where people would notice it and say how unusual and beautiful it was, and ask her where she had bought it.

  ‘Funny sort of anniversary present, glass,’ Pappy had said, as if to himself. ‘Risky, I’d have thought. After all, breaking glass is a bad omen.’

  ‘There are some people you just can’t please no matter what you do for them,’ her mother returned. ‘You may not be able to see it, but it’s beautiful, isn’t it, Ulli?’

  The light of a summer dawn spreads itself across the ruck of towels, the split tube of toothpaste, the brushes with hairs in them, the dirty-linen basket. Even though all the boys have left home, there seems to be just as much mess. Nobody has the heart to tidy up, and things lie about where they’ve been put or dropped until at last one member of the remaining family whirls round with a plastic bin-liner and throws everything in, ready or not. Ulli has taken to cleaning the shower before she gets into it.

  Ulli lays a couple of sheets of soft absorbent toilet paper across the toilet bowl, and sits down to pee as quietly as she can. This
is the second time she’s had to get up tonight, and her mother is restless, coughing and occasionally groaning aloud in the bedroom which is just across from the bathroom door. And the walls are thin. This house is not architect-built. Ulli won’t flush the toilet this time.

  It’s completely light now, and Ulli looks at the watch which she’s taken to keeping on all night this past two or three weeks, since she started waking first once and then twice or even three times between going to bed and the official start of the morning at about quarter to seven. It’s just gone one. She looks at herself in the big spotted mirror over the basin. She has always loved this mirror, with its secretive look of knowing another country which lies just behind the one it is forced to reflect back at her. She leans in, looks close. Yes, she looks different. There’s a shadowy filling out around her jaw. Her eyes are puffy and they have light brown stains under them. Well, of course, she hasn’t had any proper sleep for nights and nights. What can you expect. Quickly, she lists to herself everything which accounts for the change in the way she looks. She’s tired out. Term only finished last Friday, and it was test after test for weeks beforehand. She hasn’t felt like eating much, either. It’s the season of midsummer, when usually she’d be making plans with her friends every evening, for barbecues, for trips to the beach, for long evenings with their tanned legs sprawled on the grass, long evenings sitting close to the boys they’ve discussed endlessly while having their showers and doing their hair beforehand. Sitting closer and closer, nearly touching …

  But this year it’s all different. She has Jorma, and Jorma’s away, working as a counsellor in a summer camp two hundred kilometres to the east. It’s been fixed up for ages, since long before Ulli and Jorma got together. And he certainly can’t cancel now, and let everybody down, his parents are quite definite about that. Besides, Ulli knows that really he doesn’t want to. He’s worked there before; he knows the kids and they have a great time.

  ‘They’re terrific kids, Ulli!’

  And it’s a kind of social responsibility too. These kids wouldn’t have any summer at all, without the camp. Jorma’s mother has been careful to explain all this to Ulli. There’s a taste of tin in Ulli’s mouth. She looks down at her watch. One-fifteen. She ought to go back and try to get some rest, even if she can’t sleep. If only she could sleep properly, she’s sure she would get rid of the feeling that nothing matters except curling up with her arms around her breasts and stomach, which seem to be tender and aching all over …

  She stares deep into the mirror again, then with a decisive tug she sweeps the big yellow T-shirt she sleeps in up and over her head, and stands there naked. No, she can’t deny it any longer. Her nipples are dark and soft. Her breasts are bigger.

  No Jorma here to whisper to. No Jorma to tell her it’s nonsense, she’s imagining things. No Jorma to wrap her around with himself so that it doesn’t seem to matter any more what’s true and what isn’t, because the rest of the world is floating off somewhere with its dates and deadlines suspended. But the mirror just hangs there, waiting for more. What hasn’t it seen? Things Ulli can’t even begin to dream of.

  ‘You’ll have to try harder than this, if you want to impress me,’ says the mirror, ‘my child, my sister …’

  Annina

  That time when I was having Annina. The time I had Annina. No. It doesn’t sound right. I can say: the time when I was having Blaise. In fact I have said it, often. It’s my time, my experience, my possession. No one can contradict me about it.

  Long ago in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping and there was a frost on the ground which killed the last of my geraniums even though they’d lived through the whole of a mild winter, Annina was born.

  It doesn’t matter what I write, it comes out as lies. And that’s very suitable for the story of Annina. Annina’s taught me a new language entirely, one of lies and things you leave out. Without it, now, I wouldn’t survive. It’s more necessary to me than air to breathe.

  Annina is my little girl. Annina is my language. I speak Annina. Even in quite ordinary conversations, I pick up scraps of Annina. Out of the fuzz of static which is what ordinary English has become for me, I catch a phrase. Annina.

  My little baby-waby

  My drop of honey

  My own, my secret one.

  Quite often I hear lovers speaking a bit of Annina. It may be nauseating, but by God it’s recognizable, like one of those tunes you just hear once and it happens that you’ve got a new dress on and the sun’s shining so warmly you can smell both the cotton and your own skin.

  But this isn’t doing you justice, Annina. Here I am making a mystery out of you when all you ever wanted was to be a secret, and you’re that for sure now, because even if I wanted to pick you up and brandish you for the world to see, you’ve gone. The traces you’ve left are only those that might be made by any sick-hearted woman whose son has grown up and gone, a woman who’s always wanted a little girl, but whose little girl would need to be more a doll than a thing of flesh. THING. I never called you that. I did Blaise, of course.

  ‘Come here, you bad thing, wait till Mummy catches you.’

  None of that with Annina.

  ‘My daughter’, I called her, and ‘my girl’.

  Never little. Never creature. Never thing.

  Annina was not quite small enough to sleep inside a walnut shell. The cracked shell of a hard-boiled egg, for sure, but that would have been unnecessary. It was easy enough to make things nice for her, and why shouldn’t she have her own bed with pillow and sheets and quilt like any Christian? And she was a Christian, I made sure of that. The big drop of holy water swelling and breaking across her face. Her mouth squaring with anger. And I made the sign of the cross without bruising her forehead. I wasn’t sure if I’d done it right, so I went to an old Jesuit in a church in the city centre and told him what I’d done; nothing about the size of Annina, for fear he’d write me off as a madwoman, but everything else.

  Though maybe I could have told him, for he looked as if nothing in the world would surprise him. I’d done right, it seemed. But as I came out and felt Annina stir in her quilted sling under my blouse, I wondered why it had seemed to matter so much and why I’d gone running to the priest when there was Annina, warm and fragile as a new-laid egg. Already, even though she wasn’t yet speaking, a bit of Annina’s language had got between me and the priest, and somehow it wasn’t the word of Annina I doubted. She was always as warm as any other child. I don’t know why that should have surprised me, but it did, almost as if I thought she should have had a slighter heat to match her slight size. Or perhaps it was all the stories I used to read in my Green Fairy Book and my Red Fairy Book, where the fairies were cold and magical and lived under the hills.

  But don’t mistake me. Annina is no fairy.

  Let’s go back to when I had Annina, since there doesn’t seem to be any more accurate way of putting it. Blaise was eight at the time. He was tall for his age and he’d just had his hair cut short and freckles were coming on his nose and his cheeks from playing out after school with his friends, now the days were growing longer and lighter. He was not my baby any more, but I didn’t mind that. I have never wanted to be the sort of woman who stands back, bruised and brave, to let her young hero make his own way in life. And lets him know that she’s always waiting for him back at home. Besides, for the first time since Blaise’s birth, I was pregnant again. Not far along, about nine weeks. We’d always wanted more children, but since Blaise it’d been as if we were sitting by one of those rivers you know is full of fish, with juicy bait and a good line but not a single bite the whole afternoon. Not that we were that bothered. We’d enjoyed those afternoons, with the sun on us and the water spreading out and the chance of a little fish under the surface. No, we weren’t bothered.

  So I was looking at my future in a new way when one afternoon just before Blaise came home I bent down to see if the frost really had got the geraniums or not, and when I straightened u
p there was something warm and wet running down my legs. My first thought was that I’d wet myself. It was a long time since I’d been pregnant and anything seemed possible. But of course it was red and it was blood and at the same time it began to hurt, very slyly, as if it was mocking the period which would have come around that time of the month if I hadn’t been pregnant.

  And then there were hours of hot panic, with the doctor coming and being sorry but I’d lost the baby, and Matt coming home seeming to bring the noise and smell of the schoolchildren with him, since he’d come out of class so suddenly. Then Matt went downstairs to cook sausages just for Blaise, when he came home. Neither of us felt like anything.

  There was a little prickle under the sheet. The first stir of that small heat I grew to know better than my own temperature. Annina.

  There was a cord like a cotton thread, so I bit through it. She was an inch and a half long and as fast asleep as if she was only halfway through her long journey, and she was damned if she was going to wake up somewhere dull in the middle of it. Not like Blaise, I thought. Blaise was born crying. And that was the first difference between them which occurred to me.