Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  She’ll never go back. The bunk-beds were sold years ago. Nobody wanted them. Her brothers’ children have their own rooms. They need space and privacy, if they are to develop as individuals. Even the baby niece has coordinated lampshade, quilt, valance and puffy curtains. A slow mobile revolves above her head. Ulli’s brothers have gone away, to Berlin, to Karelia, to professions and wives. They’ve left behind dirty toenails and toothpaste going hard in the tube because nobody will ever put the top on. They’ve left behind pyjamas fished out of the dirty-linen basket to wear for one more night because there aren’t any clean ones. They’ve left behind games in the dark and lying so still you quiver when one of the grown-ups opens the door for a long second and nearly catches you. The grown-up drags on the winking tip of a cigarette while you watch through half-closed eyes. You lie frozen, so still it’s a giveaway. But then the huge dark body, Mother or Pappy, backs out of the doorway and the catch clicks and the bedroom explodes in breath and giggles and grappling under the clothes.

  ‘It’s about time we moved Ulli out of the boys’ room. She’s getting a big girl.’

  ‘Oh, Pappy, don’t make me. I’ll be frightened on my own.’

  When she calls her eldest brother on the phone she hears a hiss of silence as he tries to work out how far away she is. Then there’s the uneasy flicker of her brother’s voice. Sometimes the line goes as dead as a sponge and she knows he’s put his hand over the mouthpiece so that he can whisper to his wife:

  ‘It’s her!’

  ‘Where’s she calling from?’

  She hears the wife freeze, stooped over a pile of toys, her soft breasts spilling forward in her angora jersey.

  ‘Is it her?’

  ‘Ullikins, can you speak up? You sound awfully far away …’

  But Ulli hangs on in silence, letting the line blather and sing to itself. She doesn’t speak again. She never says where she is.

  The boys used to drag her behind them, light and bumping on their blue sledge. They asked her to choose the colour, and then they painted the sledge themselves. It was the fastest in the neighbourhood. They greased the runners so the sledge swivelled and went wild on hard-packed, late winter snow. She was their little thing. She never cried, no matter how the snow-crust whipped her face. She pressed her lips together tightly and clung on to the sides of the sledge as the boys raced for the top of the run. They passed everyone. They were first.

  It was close to dark all day long. In the hollows the snow was blue. Their mother had hung a lantern in the spruce nearest their fence. Its light flared out at them as they swung the sledge round and ran for home. But they turned too sharply and the sledge heeled over on one runner so that it ploughed up a great white wave of snow and half-buried her. Then it righted itself and the boys were charging forward again and she was careering along behind, her body shaking with the bumps, keeping her lips shut. She took in shaky little sips of air and looked down so she wouldn’t see them take the next curve. The runners hissed through the snow. She was never frightened, the boys boasted. They told their friends that you could take Ulli anywhere, right down the big runs. She held on. Not a squeak out of her.

  All that winter she was the boys’ little thing in her navy-blue snowsuit and her scarlet quilted cap. She went down wedged between their knees on the long runs and her head was thrown back against the sharp zip of her brother’s parka as the sledge ran over a bump. They skimmed the steep white slopes, and then the boys gave the rope a jerk sideways and they tore off the track, swooping down between trees, whacking the sledge in and out of the black trunks as they reared up ahead, again and again until Ulli had to stare down at her own knees so as not to see the snow racing alongside them and the poles rearing up, wicked as horses.

  The crust of the snow froze fast. The boys’ boots crushed it down with a thick, toasty sound. Once Ulli was walking in the woods, on her own, in the middle of the day. The boys were at school. Mother was sleeping. At the top of the next rise she saw two eyes and the prickling top of a cat’s head. Or was it a cat? Its yellow eyes didn’t flinch. They stared straight back into hers. Its wild striped coat rippled and she thought of snakes. She could not tell how big it was. The piece of pine fallen beside it might have been a great tree. Pappy had told her about wild cats. Was the rise a long slow sledgers’ hill, or just a little lip she could step over without getting snow in the top of her boots? Behind the yellow cat there was more biting yellow sky. Her brothers had told her that there was going to be more snow, a fresh fall. The wind was veering round, they said. The cat’s short claws would rip and hurt. She thought of a mouse, mashed up as it ran about trying to keep alive. Did a mouse know how small it was, when it ran about? Did the cat know Ulli was bigger than it was?

  Once Pappy had hurt himself because he lost his temper with the boys. There was something in the air all day, crackly, like claws. Mother had been out too long, then she came back and slammed about making dinner. Ulli had her smocked dress on and she was pretty, sitting by Pappy at the dinner table and eating her cold meat in little bites, prinking up her lips. There was screaming round the table but she ate on with her head down, taking smaller and smaller bites, finicking with her knife. Pappy had gone red and raw in the face, crashing after Pekka with his mouth open, bringing his hand down and just missing the arm Pekka threw up to shield his face. Pappy’s fist smashed down on the white table with all the force that should have gone into Pekka’s face, and Pekka was still screaming with laughter, his hand over his mouth.

  Later, she saw Mother and Pappy leaning against the sitting-room mantelpiece, heads together. Mother had one hand on the back of Pappy’s hurt hand. She was stirring the joints of his fingers.

  ‘It needs the doctor,’ she said.

  Pappy humped himself over the mantelpiece and said nothing. And nothing more was ever said. No harsh words. A chaste feel to the house for days. The boys not whistling. Pekka looking pleased with himself and a little scared. What had they brought off this time? Mother doing everything as if people from outside were looking at her. Mother putting on an apron, which she never wore, and baking a loaf of bread which griped them all with indigestion. Pappy working late with a glove of bandage on his right hand. At the office he said he had hurt it chopping wood for Ulli’s grandmother. About time they got central heating for the old woman!

  When the bandages came off she saw Pappy looking at his own hand with a small proud look, as if he’d been wondering what on earth it was up to down there in the dark, under the crust of white bandages which had to be changed twice by a girl at the dispensary, who was as crisp and fresh as a bandage herself. Ulli had been expecting Pappy’s hand to come out from under the bandages grey and stinking like the town flower plots when their ice cover finally broke under the pressure of spring. She watched him sign a cheque. The pen ticked its way luxuriously along the creamy line of the signature square. His name came out just the same as always. Why should it be that Pappy’s signature was always the same, while her own veered and wavered from day to day, no matter how many curlicues she added to it to give it character? You should never complain of the smell when things unfroze, Pappy had told them. It was a sign of life.

  Ulli stands still in the falling snow outside a block of apartments. This is where she had her first room when she came to the city. This is where she began to learn to be on her own. What did she buy for Pappy that first Christmas away? Gloves. Driving gloves with skinny leather palms. She’d chosen a plain crimson label. WITH LOTS OF LOVE FROM YOUR OWN ULLI. A HAPPY CHRISTMAS.

  Tons of love.

  All the love in the world.

  I kiss your hand my darling, before I say goodbye …

  Then she’d posted the gloves to a friend in Tampere, to send them on from there, so that nobody at home would be able to tell where she was from the postmark.

  But never again will she crouch in the right-hand corner of their old blunt-headed Saab, with her eyes fixed on Pappy’s profile, diagonally opposite her in the driving
seat. When she was very young, she used to think he was always smiling. She saw the lift and tilt of his cheekbones, the hollows underneath, and she read off the shape as a smile. It was years before she realized that his face was set ahead, impassive and watchful, brooding on traffic or dinner or the Christmas bonus. Her mother used to light cigarettes one after another, and put them between his lips. The boys never came. They couldn’t stand being in the car with him.

  Years later, the same cheekbones broke through in her own face. For no reason, in shops and queues, in the half-light of cinemas or the glare of sunbathing, she looks happy. She can’t help it. Her cheekbones lift and tilt. Her mouth seems to curl up in a secret smile. The planes of her face offer happiness.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘Go on, tell us the joke!’

  ‘Hey, smiler!’

  ‘You look cheerful, sweetheart.’

  ‘Hey, look at her! She’s got something to smile about all right!’

  ‘Morning, sunshine!’

  ‘Hello, smiler!’

  Ulli shivers. She’d like to run her hands across her face to find out if the smile is still planted there. She has tried hard to uproot it, but after all, you need to be able to smile. And it always comes back, Ulli’s little dimple. Perhaps this is why she likes fat men. Not too fat, of course. Not gross. But fleshy men with no deceptive hollows. Men with thick, springy flesh which makes space for her, folds her away, eases her bones. Men who are so heavy on top of her that her breath is crushed to the top of her lungs. Men whose flesh she can wallow in, playing and swimming. Ulli-mouse. Mouse-baby. Ullikins.

  Fat men asleep give out heat like furnaces all night. And often they wheeze a little, so that whatever time you wake, however sick and singing your head feels, you know you have company. All night the mattress gives way under their weight and you roll against the elastic warmth of their sides. You know you cannot roll off and away into space. Whatever the bed advertisements say, Ulli knows there is nothing as sleep-giving as the shoulder and breast of a fat man. Ulli’s brothers are fit and slim. There is no spaciousness in them. And as for herself, her body looks all dark sharp triangles, from her crotch to the nape of her neck where her heavy plait bisects the twin wings of her shoulder-blades. Her scooped face takes a good photograph from any angle.

  Ulli hurries past the restaurant where she ate dinner last night. The fair doorman is taking away a woman’s coat. She leans forward like a diver as he peels off the sleeves. Ulli smells meat, but it doesn’t make her hungry. She’ll go home, take the telephone out of the cupboard, plug it in. She’ll drowse on the bed, reading and eating liquorice. Later her fat man will phone her, to let her know he’s coming. At eleven-thirty he’ll ring her doorbell and shake the snow off his huge overcoat. The cold will have made his nose run. Snow will stand in the close-curled lambskin collar of his overcoat. He’ll make one of his bad jokes. He’s bound to have a bottle with him, because the fact that she doesn’t drink much shocks him, and he hates her prim half-bottles of wine. She doesn’t drink enough, and she certainly doesn’t eat enough. There isn’t a pick of flesh on her. He has no special name for her. He just calls her Ulli.

  She’ll shut the door and put on Ray Charles. Her room is innocent of Christmas, immune. It smells of the wrinkling winter apples in a bowl by her bed. Without taking off his overcoat he’ll sit on the blanket-box by the stove, his thighs spread. He grumbles that she has no comfortable chair. He’ll pour himself a drink from his bottle into one of the hand-blown glasses she bought once on a teenage weekend trip to Sweden. They’d visited the glass-blowers in the forest north of Javle, on a soaking-wet late September day. She remembers the little tongs the man used to twist off the end of the glass. Then he snipped it like hot pulled candy.

  The glass will mist around her fat man’s warm spatulate fingers. He won’t move for a while. They never touch straight away, and neither is much of a one for kisses. Only sometimes after sex she’ll kiss deep into his thick flesh, as if eating it. He’ll sigh hugely as the drink hits him. Later he’ll wash and pee with the toilet door shut. They are still careful in such ways. They haven’t known each other long.

  ‘Well,’ he’ll say, ‘how’s it going?’

  A Grand Day

  ‘No, no thank you, I won’t. I’ve my sermon to prepare for tonight.’ Laughter. It’s a standing joke in the parish that I scribble my sermons on the back of an old missalette, five minutes before Mass. They don’t see me sweating for days over a few jokes to put into it. I don’t even like jokes in sermons, but you have to have them. People expect it. It doesn’t matter how bad the jokes are, though, thank God.

  The altar boys are tearing about the car park on skateboards with their baseball caps on back-to-front and their cottas and cassocks stuffed into Tesco bags. The social club ladies are clearing out the parish hall, getting rid of squashed fairy cakes and Twiglets and wiping up pools of lemonade. Bin-bag after bin-bag after bin-bag of it. First Communion over again for another year. I wish the relatives wouldn’t give the kids money. I say it every year. A nice book of the saints, perhaps, or a crucifix. Something they can keep. But every year it’s the same. As soon as the Mass is over, the kids are in huddles counting out their money.

  ‘How much did you get?’

  ‘My Uncle Jimmy give me a ten-pound note, look at it.’

  ‘My godmother’s tight, all she gave me was two pounds and a rosary.’

  ‘I’ll swap you the rosary for my holy medal. It’s real gold, look.’

  ‘That’s not real gold. Don’t you know anything?’

  A hot day. Great weather, thank God for it. Perfect weather for taking photographs.

  ‘Will you stand still this minute, Liam!’

  ‘Push her veil back a bit, I can’t get her face in.’

  ‘Now let’s have them all together. Smile!’

  ‘Don’t they look lovely?’

  And they do. They do, year after year. The girls in their white dresses and veils, their white shoes and socks, their little wreaths of artificial flowers to hold the veils down. The boys in their white shirts and ties and long dark trousers. Some of the Italian kids wear miniature tailored suits that cost a fortune, though each year I give the parents the same talk at the preparation evenings, about how it’s not the clothes that count, and let’s keep it simple this year. But they never do. I have parents on Income Support beggaring themselves to buy the most expensive First Communion dresses. They’d be insulted at the idea of anything second-hand.

  And they’re all smiling into the camera, some of them a bit shy and others bold as brass, gap-toothed and grinning. Click. And the next moment they’re counting their money again and spilling lemonade down their dresses and then the day’s over. But they’ve got the photographs. I banned camcorders after the Rigby kid shoved her way to the front the year before last saying she had to be first because her daddy was filming it. There was very nearly a free fight between the parents of the kids she’d pushed out of the way and the Rigbys. So it’s no camcorders and no flash photography in church, though it’s hard to enforce. I spotted a grandmother this year filming from under a spare veil. I could make a joke out of that, I suppose.

  So I’m not going to any of the parties afterwards, though I must have been asked to a dozen. I go to the First Communion Breakfast in the Parish Hall, and that’s it. It only gives offence to go to one family’s party, and not to another’s. And I like the quiet when they’ve all gone.

  ‘It was great, wasn’t it, Father?’

  ‘And didn’t they look lovely?’

  They did.

  I wander into the church. It’s dark now, and quiet. You can’t believe that a couple of hours ago all these pews were full to bursting. Standing at the back, I try to imagine what it’s like to look at myself up there at the altar. But I can’t imagine it. I am forty-four years old, and that’s not an age for looking in mirrors. It seems that you have years and years of being a young priest and then suddenly you look rou
nd and you’re not young any more. But you aren’t old yet, and you begin to get a bit panicky. You remember how sure and settled all those older priests seemed when you were first ordained. And now you are the age they were. Seven years to go before my silver jubilee. Twenty-five years a priest, that’s something, isn’t it? Of course it is. I’ll preach about how it’s like marriage. It has its rough places and there are times when you wish you could just walk away. But the bond grows stronger all the time. And they’ll look up at me from the pews and they’ll be glad I’ve said it, glad that I’m so sure and settled.

  Silver jubilee. And then on through my fifties and sixties, marrying men and women whom I baptized. I’ve been ten years in the parish, and some of the babies I baptized are coming up for their Confirmations already. It’s funny how one or two baptisms stick in your mind out of the whole lot of them. The second Bagenal kid I remember. Andrew. He’d been born fifteen months after the first, and Kitty Bagenal had postnatal depression. They had the baptism the week after she got out of Moorleaze Hospital, and she didn’t want to hold the baby. They gave him to me to hold at the party afterwards and there I was holding him for hours it seemed, heavy and warm in my arms, fast asleep. And all the women were saying I had the touch, and saying they’d send theirs up to the presbytery when they cried. He was so heavy in my arms. Warm. He’s not turned out so well though, Andrew Bagenal. In with the Child Guidance already.

  ‘Father.’

  I turn round, blinking through the dark of the church. I see her like a shadow by one of the pillars. Clare Cullen.

  ‘Is that you, Clare?’ I ask, and I hear my own cheery voice die away in the empty church.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Father.’

  ‘Were you at the First Communion? I didn’t see you there. It’s a grand day, isn’t it?’

  Grand. I hate that word. But it’s the kind of thing I find myself saying all the time.

  ‘Is it?’ says Clare. ‘I haven’t been out much.’