Five hundred pounds, though. I mean, it’s not that I don’t have a day job, but when you tend to eat beyond your means, a nice fat cheque is always welcome.
There were seven steps up to the door. I stood there looking at them for some time while I waited for my breath to come back and my heart to slow down. A very prim and proper woman pushed past me with an audible sniff, trotted up them double time and cast a glance back at me like I was soiling the pavement.
In the end I took the wheelchair access. It was a long way plodding up the switchback ramp, but those stairs looked pretty steep and I have big feet, just like the rest of me. They say inside every fat person there’s a thin person trying to get out, but take it from me, my inner person was pretty big to start with and very happy with where he was.
There was an awkward moment at the desk, because to be honest I’d lied a bit when I gave them my details over the phone. I may have dropped a few stone when I gave my weight, and hedged a bit over medical conditions, but you have to be competitive in this game. If you start bandying the word ‘obese’ around, you’d be surprised how many studies that gets you barred from. Thankfully, after that initial double take – or maybe it was a triple take – she just gave me the disclaimer to sign and sat me down with the others.
There must have been a dozen people kicking their heels in the waiting room – and probably as many had gone and twice as many were yet to show. All sorts, too: sometimes on these things you can spot the type of subject they’re after, but there I saw men, women, pensioners, students. Nobody quite of my demographic, it was true. Sometimes a man really is an island.
There was one guy in particular whose type I recognized, as the sheep knows the wolf, or the rabbit knows whatever it is that eats rabbits. He looked as though he had come there straight from the gym: iron-framed, lean, hard-jawed, arms bare and his T-shirt fashionably sweat-marked from the jog over. I mean, my T-shirt was sweaty too, right? Only I didn’t make a big thing of it like he did.
I felt aggrieved at how unfair the pre-attendance instructions had been. I mean, nowhere had it said ‘nil by gym for 24 hours.’ Why discriminate against my hobbies?
It wasn’t often that I shared a room with someone like that – not since school anyway. I could feel all those childhood reflexes kicking in, ready for the inevitable looks and sneers. I mean, of course he didn’t say anything, because we were both English, and you don’t, but his expression said it for him. Contempt, sheer bloody contempt, because he was so smugly proud about that muscular physique that it was a wonder he hadn’t had his BMI tattooed on his forehead. He looked at me and just saw ‘weak’, someone who could be as lean and mean as he was if only I tried.
Worse, he then cast that look around the room, let everyone there have the benefit of his tremendously valuable opinion of my shortcomings. I hated him with a passion, felt my face burn as I sat down. The chair – and it was Harley Street, so it was a solid old oak piece – creaked like a fart.
They kept me waiting – I think there were loads more people than they’d really planned for, but at £500 a shot I guess that was inevitable. I thought they’d turn me away, but it was plain they were desperate for subjects, the more the merrier. They got round to us all eventually.
I was led through to a pokey little room, asked to get myself onto an inconveniently high table-slab-thing, for which a nurse considerately lent me a shove. Then a face swam into my vision. This was my first sight of Doctor Mellinger.
He was a good-looking guy, in a bland sort of a way, middle aged, hair uniformly dark enough that probably he’d started dying it. No glasses but he did have a white coat, so I knew he had to be legit.
“Hello,” brief glance sideways at my notes, “Ben, good to see you. Thank you for contributing to our research. Your assistance is very valuable to us.” He had a really easy manner, the way I always wished I could talk, because that kind of confidence will get you anything. For the space of that half hour he made me feel like I, me myself, was an integral part of his study, that he couldn’t have done it without me. I mean yes, I was telling myself that I was just one more set of numbers amongst hundreds, and that it didn’t matter that I’d had that bacon but, despite all that, Doc Mellinger made me proud to be his lab assistant for the brief time he actually had a use for me.
He stuck some electrodes on my forehead, and he explained a lot of stuff about how he would be mapping my brain and downloading my thought patterns and science science science. I mean, yes, so I don’t really remember most of what he said because it went over my head, but probably it wasn’t the truth anyway. Besides, before you get judgmental, I’ll bet you’ve clicked through software licences or bought insurance without reading the small print.
I mean, yes, none of those things involves someone sticking electric stuff into your actual brain, but the principle’s the same, isn’t it?
“Now, Ben, while we scan your brain I need a lot of positive reinforcement from you,” Doc Mellinger told me. “I want you to think about what you enjoy, in as much detail as you possibly can. Think about the things that make you happy. Think what you’ll do with the money we’ll give you. Most of all, though, think about what it is that you do best. Your strengths, Ben. Think about the things that you do well.”
I guess I don’t need to tell you what I thought about. That way the bacon was research, and therefore not so bad. I loved greasy spoon café bacon. I swear, nowhere else does it like that. It’s magic.
I felt pretty weird during the experiment. There was a buzzing sound, and my skin kept twitching on its own, whatever the electrodes were zapping me with. I wanted to do my best for the Doc, though, so I kept my mind focused: bacon, chocolate, cakes, crisps, pizza. I gave him a solid five minutes of a particularly good Four Seasons with extra olives and pepperoni in such mouth-watering detail that it should have been worth the £500 just on its own. By the time I was done there, I’d almost drowned in saliva.
“And stop,” said the Doc at last, although to be honest I kept up the research on my own time, because I was seriously feeling a need for lunch by then.
“That’s excellent, Ben. Again, thank you very much for making this possible. Without people like you, scientific progress would grind to a halt,” and more stuff like that, but by then I had worked myself into something of a feeding frenzy and was already reaching for my phone so I could hunt out the nearest place that did cheeseburgers. I went through to the waiting room again, and Mr Fitness was next up, already on his feet and waiting for me to negotiate the doorway. His disgusted expression hurt somewhat, but the cheque more than made up for that.
I did feel odd, after that, but I wrote it off as a bad cheeseburger. I felt strange the next day too.
I got a burger bar breakfast the next morning and it didn’t exactly hit the spot, but it was enough to keep me going. On workdays I tend to be on autopilot until it gets to around lunchtime, anyway. When lunch did roll around, that pizza was still so prominently in my mind that I figured I’d head back for an encore, because there was this place just round the corner that knew me, and did them just how I liked them. I knocked off ten minutes early to cover the travel time, got myself a table just as the lunch rush started, and placed my order, garlic bread on the side.
Okay, garlic bread varies – even at the same place, some days it’s better than others. Sometimes they’re cheap with the butter, you know? I chewed over it while I waited for the main course to come, and reckoned it wasn’t one of their good days. Still, the bread filled a hole, and it would keep body and soul together until the pizza arrived.
The pizza arrived.
I stared. It was done just as I liked it, the cheese still bubbling, the little discs of pepperoni baked half-black and the stuffed crust crispy on the outside, oozing oily goodness from within.
I felt a bit ill, looking at it. The topping was very greasy, and the whole thing was huge, and it sat in front of me like a broad cheese-and-tomato-topped toad with the sausage as warts.
/> My stomach sent urgent directives, and my hands knew the drill. Even as I stared at the pizza, thinking that I must be very ill indeed, I was cutting out a big slice.
I don’t know what it’s like when you eat. I don’t know if you ever saw something advertised as ‘a party in your mouth’. For me, that’s eating food. Not any particular dish or delicacy, just Food, you know? Worthy of the capital letter. The act of eating really should be that party. That pizza should have been, ‘Hey! I’m Parmesan! Mind if I come in? I brought this six pack of tomato and these hot olive twins!’
Eating that pizza was not like a party in my mouth. It was as if the flavours came trudging onto my tongue to clock in, sullen and surly like it was Monday morning at the worst office in the world. It wasn’t that I couldn’t taste them – every nuance was right there, each ingredient standing on its own and blending together just as they should – but the experience was joyless. It was grim. I chewed my way through that pizza like a death row convict who got the wrong thing for his last meal.
I thought it was just Italian, at first. For the rest of the week, and with increasing desperation, I ate the world. Chow mein slid down my throat, slick and worm-like. Curries were stodgy as porridge. No amount of secret blends of herbs and spices could save the fried chicken. Bacon… I left bacon until last, in the same way that someone sick to death will finally make that desperate pilgrimage to some statue in France that still occasionally dispenses the odd miracle. Friday morning, I went to a greasy spoon and I told them to cook me up the best bacon in the world, nice and crispy and dripping with fat, fried bread, eggs done both sides, sausages, mushrooms, beans, everything.
I tasted every mouthful, as rich and sharp and perfect as if God Himself had been the fry cook, and each bite was like ashes in my mouth. It was good. It was perfect. I took no joy from it. Eating my way through that mound of food was nothing but a chore. I gave up halfway because it was boring me.
Straight after, I called the hospital, telling them something catastrophic had happened. I didn’t say what, over the phone. I was terrified they would laugh.
“Come right in,” they said, and I did. I became spontaneously sick, left the office and hit the tube.
Doc Mellinger in person came straight into the waiting room to meet with me. He listened with utmost seriousness as I described my problem. He didn’t laugh. I saw great gravitas in him, the demeanour of a medical man on whose shoulders rests all human wellbeing. He made copious notes. He took some blood.
“That’s most concerning, Ben,” he told me. “But never you mind. I’ll make this my priority, me personally. We’ll contact you as soon as we have anything, but you rest assured, we’ll sort you out. We’ll get to the bottom of things and put everything right.” He was infinitely convincing. I was infinitely convinced. I went home with the utter assurance that no less a man than Doctor Mellinger himself was on the case.
The days passed.
I began to lose weight. I know what you’re thinking. You’re sitting there, with your exercise bike and your Q-plan diet, shouting out, “You lucky bastard!” as though this was something I’d asked for. I mean yes, perhaps I had occasionally thought that things would be better for me if I wasn’t quite so much around the waist and weighed under thirty-five stone, but I never for a moment considered that the trade-off of not eating as much was worth it. You don’t understand, you see; I ate when I was bored; I ate when I was depressed; I ate when the long, lonely evenings became too much to endure on an empty stomach. I was a gourmand. I ate because I enjoyed it. People looked at me and they thought, ‘the food’s the problem’, when the food was really the solution, and the problem was everything else.
Now I was like an addict cut off from his drug, and unable even to enjoy the cold turkey. The problems were all still there but I had no way to deal with them. I was so unhappy you can’t imagine. Eating had always been my way of blunting the slings and arrows of the world, and now I was miserable 24/7 without any way of taking the edge off. Having to wear belts because all my sweat pants were too large was no compensation.
I took up smoking. It didn’t help. The colossal weight of my depression chewed up antidepressants and spat them out. Hunger pangs, which had once been like a good old friend calling me up with sound advice, were now a nagging spouse with whom arguments could never be won, only postponed.
A week passed. I called again and spoke to the receptionist. The Doc himself found twenty seconds for me over the phone, assuring me that I would hear from him in the next few days, a week at the most.
I didn’t hear from him in the next few days, or the week after that. In the end I hauled myself out of the house and sloped my way down to Harley Street.
And he’d gone. Some other bunch of medical sods was holed up in the place. Of Doc Mellinger and his staff and his brass nameplate and all that, there was no sign. When I enquired within, nobody would even admit to having heard of him.
I remember standing outside the door of that place, in clothes that were starting to hang off me – hell, in skin that was starting to hang off me – and just raging like some complete loon, howling at the sky like a child that wants his toy back.
I recognized the truth then. I hadn’t lost my appetite. It had been stolen from me.
When I was done – and remember, this was Harley Street so it gets its share of nutters, though usually better-dressed ones than me – I turned back for the tube station, shoulders slumped in defeat, and found myself face to face with a man.
I didn’t know him at first. He was wearing stained slacks and a T-shirt that looked too tight for him about the middle, and he hadn’t shaved much recently, and I thought he was a tramp, or maybe a labourer if only he had been wearing steel-toe boots, because he’d obviously had a bit of a physique that he’d let go to seed.
That was when it clicked.
“Mr Fitness,” I said.
“The fat guy,” he replied, and it was as if we were superheroes, nemeses maybe, meeting at last.
He took me to a café nearby. There were a handful of other people there, all of whom were fairly hung with misery. It was like Alcoholics Anonymous, only instead of alcoholics none of us had a name for what we were. There was that same sense of shared privation, though. We had stories that nobody else could appreciate, or even believe.
Mr Fitness’s real name was Steve – of course it was, give me three guesses and I’d have got it – and he related how he had got up the day after the experiment and missed his morning workout – just overslept a bit and had to dash off to work, thought no more about it. Only he had been on the way to the gym that evening and found himself thinking, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ Habit is powerful, and he’d gone, but he’d been flagging, feeling the heat and then getting out of the kitchen. He’d cheated on his reps, for the first time ever. He’d found himself – he told us in a hushed and horrified voice – getting bored with it, the constant over and over of the circuit training. That iron drive, the will to be fit that normally drove him joyously through two hours of full-body flagellation, was lacking. He thought that he might be ill.
Over the next week, he let it all slide, his routines falling apart measure by measure, while he sat on the sofa and watched Bargain Hunt or ogled porn on the net. He didn’t say that last part, but I thought he looked the type.
He, too, had gone to see the good doctor, and had gone away with his personal reassurances. And now Doc had upped and left us all in the lurch.
There was a grey-faced, bag-eyed woman named Sarah, who said she hadn’t slept more than ten minutes at a stretch since she volunteered. “It’s the bloody kids,” she moaned wearily. “I was always able to sleep through it before.” I met a shopkeeper who’d made change in his head for twenty years and was now reliant on a pocket calculator. There was a taxi driver who’d had to invest in a satnav after consistently failing to find his way anywhere since his test, even from his door to his car if he’d parked it on the next street. The stories went on, ea
ch of us with our own unique and individual loss that had cored our lives like so many apples.
“We’ve got to do something,” Steve decided.
We did, but none of the somethings we tried worked. We wrote to the British Medical Association. We started internet forums. We engaged enquiry agents. We tried to find our man on Facebook and Linkedin.
We called the police, who weren’t remotely interested seeing as – to quote – they didn’t have a Non-existent Crimes Unit.
We tried contacting the press, but that backfired when it was me that talked to the reporters, and they plugged the whole piece as some sort of miracle diet and got it completely arse backwards. Insult to injury, that’s what it was.
We met, or some of us met, every month or so – because I am talking months going past, at this point. We were exhausting the collected resources of the information age, drawing more blanks than a movie gun fight, running up every blind alley in every city in the world.
We weren’t very good at this. It took us over a month and a firm denial from the BMA before we realized that Mellinger wasn’t even the man’s real name. If he was still running the same scam, then it was in a different city and as a different person.
We had a few near misses. Once, Sarah found an ad for research subjects that looked as if it originated with the good doctor, but it was months old, some place in Birmingham, and he’d already cleared out long before. We also gatecrashed some probably entirely respectable research studies because they sounded like the right sort of thing, but then the original ad had been vague to the point of meaninglessness. Only the price tag had caught all of our attentions.
Feast and Famine Page 7