by Michel Faber
On television, she’d played a criminal’s girlfriend (or possibly wife) in an episode of a popular detective series, a good meaty part which had required her to convey Anxiety, Love, Bitterness, and finally Grief and Horror when her boyfriend (or possibly husband) went down in a hail of police bullets.
Her one movie role so far had required rather less acting than that, but at least she hadn’t bared her breasts, unless you were going to split hairs over where exactly breasts began.
Mostly, however, she did commercials, through the agency of Carp & Bravitt. Starring and supporting roles came in mixed succession: one day she might be almost lost in a crowd of women gaping at a man because he was wearing a particular brand of shirt; the next day she might be the star, holding a can of floor polish with a smile. Next time after that, however, she might again be running in a crowd, following a seven-foot rabbit to a supermarket.
Obviously there wasn’t much of a future in commercials, but Miss Fatt had high hopes for her acting career: in a few weeks, she would be playing another, different girlfriend (or possibly wife) of a criminal in another, different television drama, and in about two months she was actually contracted to play a sinister, sexy villainess in Lethal Weapon VI, a big-budget international movie. This was certainly a big deal, in any sense of the word.
‘Heard about your film job coming up, Suzie,’ said Mr Carp.
‘Yeah,’ said Mr Bravitt. ‘A real stroke of luck. But you deserve it, Suzie.’
Both men thought she had excellent legs and breasts.
The makers of TV commercials were always very nice to her, too, because it was against their interests to have anyone miserable associated with the product. For Miss Fatt, a commercial meant nothing less than an afternoon of fun. Directors would ask her how she was going, did she want a cup of tea, would she mind awfully doing just one more retake?
‘All right girls: big leap in the air now … Come on! I know it’s daft, but let’s all think happy thoughts about getting paid for this!’
In all her years in TV commercials, even as the lowliest extra, Miss Fatt hadn’t had one unkind word said to her. She might not have impressed anyone as a marvel, yet, but she was, it was generally agreed, a really nice girl. And, when the shooting was over, Miss Fatt would swing into her little car and drive home.
First Month
It was on the 25th of April that Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne first began to suffer from their unusual problem.
Miss Thinne turned off the alarm at seven and slid out of bed into her slippers. It was her turn to make the breakfast, and with dutiful contentment she gathered together the makings, such as bread, margarine, eggs, tea and so on. But when she’d finished gathering them together, the hoard suddenly struck her as a monstrously large one. In fact, it seemed so excessive that she was a bit revolted: did she really have such a gluttonous appetite as this pile of food would suggest?
As if to answer her own question, she looked deep into herself and tried to examine her appetite, but glimpsed only the last trickles of it disappearing into a black hole It seemed to have been lost as helplessly, as inevitably, as water out of a colander. Within a few moments she was entirely taken over by the realisation that eating was not for her. she’d been doing it for too long. What on earth was the point, after all, of putting things in your mouth, pulping them up with your teeth, and swallowing them?
‘What’s wrong?’
It was Miss Fatt, come into the kitchen in her slippers and nightgown. She looked at Miss Thinne as if to say, What are you doing just standing there? And Miss Thinne looked back at Miss Fatt as if to say, What are you in such a hurry for?
‘I couldn’t wait,’ said Miss Fatt. ‘I’m so hungry.’ She ogled the eggs in the egg-basket, but they were hard-shelled and raw, intolerable minutes away from being ready to eat, so she went for the bread instead, snatching up slices of it straight from the packet.
‘Oh my God, what a hunger,’ she mumbled, stuffing herself.
‘Go ahead,’ conceded Miss Thinne. ‘Eat it all. I’m not a bit hungry this morning. Couldn’t eat a bite.’ And she stood there, shivering in her nightgown, marvelling at the ability of a human to do what Miss Fatt was doing.
Miss Fatt frowned in mid-chew and pointed out with some concern,
‘You should eat something.’
Miss Thinne opened the refrigerator and scooped a handful of grated carrot out of a plastic bowl. With uncommon delicacy she took her seat at the kitchen table and, while Miss Fatt continued eating slices of undecorated bread, she stared at the handful of carrot and reflected,
‘You know, this is really quite a lot, when you think about it. It must be … four or five cubic centimetres, at least. The whole human stomach wouldn’t even be five cubic centimetres, would it?’
‘Oh, much more than that,’ demurred Miss Fatt, gasping in between swallows. ‘Anyway, it stretches.’
‘Ugh,’ said Miss Thinne. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ Carefully she transferred some of the carrot to her other hand and nibbled, like a suspicious animal, at the reduced amount.
Miss Fatt swallowed hard on her sixth slice of bread and was comforted by the realisation that if she put some eggs on to boil now, she could continue eating bread until they were cooked.
In due course, Miss Thinne and Miss Fatt went to work.
‘And what do you do of a weekend, Eleanor?’ a co-worker asked Miss Thinne over morning tea.
‘I play the oboe in the Catholic Women’s Sinfonia,’ she replied.
‘You’re joking!’
‘No, I learned it at convent school, and sort of never gave it up. It’s a lot of fun.’
‘Ha! Ha! Good for you!’
Miss Thinne blushed, sipped her tea, but did not touch her biscuit.
Miss Fatt went off to the countryside to be driven around. She was playing the wife of a man who had just bought the right brand of car. A camera mounted variously on the bonnet, the side windows and the back seat filmed the two of them smiling at each other, so pleased with the car’s wonderful performance. Miss Fatt’s seat belt kept her breasts separate, for easy viewer identification; the rear-view mirror was angled towards her, so that she could judge whether the wind was blowing her hair in an unphotogenic direction. If that happened, she had the authority to order the car stopped so that she could get a touch-up from the hairdresser – now if that wasn’t star treatment, what was? ‘How about a drink after?’ proposed the actor at the wheel to Miss Fatt. There was no sound being recorded by the cameras, of course, so only expert lip-readers would have known he wasn’t expressing his delight at the steering or suspension.
‘Why not invite me out to lunch?’ said Miss Fatt. She had never asked a man anything like this before.
The actor laughed. ‘All right, love.’
Over the roar of the engine, which in the finished commercial would be replaced by exhilarating music, Miss Fatt’s stomach rumbled and whined.
Second Month
By the 25th of May, Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne were developing rather different shapes from those they’d had for years. The cause was, respectively, eating and not eating.
In the mornings, Miss Thinne ate almost nothing, and Miss Fatt almost everything. Because the grocery expenses remained much the same, neither of the women made any fuss about this new routine; in any case, it had established itself so abruptly and so invincibly that they were forced to accept that it was meant to be.
Only once did they share any apprehension about what might lie in store for them, and on that occasion they merely caught each other’s eye across the kitchen table and, pushing aside for a moment a bowl of porridge and a stick of celery respectively, they joined hands and squeezed until their grip trembled and tears welled up in their eyes.
‘You’re looking awfully smart, Eleanor,’ Miss Thinne’s co-workers said at first, for her weight loss made her look, well, willowy, at least in clothes.
‘How do you do it?’ was also much asked. ‘Whenever I
go on a diet, nothing happens.’
And then again: ‘Being skinny’s all the rage these days. When I was a girl, you were supposed to be plump and rosy!’
Miss Thinne was thin and rosy. The rosy part was from a make-up kit.
Miss Fatt did a lot of exercise each day, to keep her weight gain within reasonable limits. Her belly was still trim, but she was putting on quite a bit on her breasts, thighs and bottom.
‘Shaping up for Lethal Weapon VI, eh?’ guessed Mr Carp. ‘You’ll stun ’em, Suzie.’
‘What a body,’ sighed Mr Bravitt, out of earshot.
Miss Fatt’s actor friend took her out to lunch and dinner regularly. A couple of times she’d even accompanied him back to his flat, which had very little in it except a bed and a refrigerator. She’d used his refrigerator, but not his bed, though she knew it was only a matter of time before he demanded some sort of sexual reward for his generosity. The problem was, sometimes his flat was just so much closer, as far as the next meal was concerned, than her own home.
Third Month
By the 25th of June the two women were becoming remarkable.
Miss Thinne was as thin as she had been at the beginning of puberty. Her thighs and calves had lost all superfluous fat; her clavicles and shoulderblades were becoming prominent, her fingers taper-like. Her bra became wrinkled with unoccupied space; her clothes hung loose and slid about on her as she moved. Her neck seemed to have grown; cheekbones appeared where none, even with the aid of cosmetics, had ever been before.
‘You know, Eleanor,’ suggested her colleagues. ‘You may be taking this diet too far. ’
‘Think of your health, dear. We wouldn’t want you to disappear into thin air. ’
‘You look great just as you are now, honestly.’
‘But it’s not that I’m dieting,’ protested Miss Thinne mildly. ‘I just don’t want to eat anything.’
In that case, it was agreed, she should see a doctor.
But Miss Thinne knew that her metamorphosis was meant to be.
Miss Fatt knew it too, and took no action, apart from exercise and (lately) a girdle.
‘D’you think Mel Gibson likes ’em that big?’ joked Mr Carp, only trying to be nice. He thought that she was perhaps overeating out of nerves at the prospect of the imminent movie role. As for her television assignment playing the girlfriend (or possibly wife) of the criminal, that had come and gone, and Miss Fatt had received high praise for her performance. The director had been delighted, actually, that she was so much more curvaceous than she’d been at the audition. ‘Good slattern potential,’ he’d pronounced, and ordered a teddy for her, presumably from that shelf in the wardrobe department marked VOLUPTUOUS SLATTERN. But he’d said it in the nicest possible way, as a professional director to a professional actress.
Of course, this was a couple of weeks ago now, and she had gained more weight since then. A punishing regime of jogging and press-ups waged a losing battle against the six square meals a day with which she was covering her former shape with soft new flesh.
‘My God you eat a lot,’ said her actor friend one day. His perfect failure to understand excited a small flame of contempt in her, and she looked at him condescendingly, as if to say, But of course I do – what else would you expect?
Fourth Month
On the 25th of July Miss Thinne began her day by bringing a tray of food in to Miss Fatt. She herself took small bites of a Chinese lettuce as Miss Fatt devoured pancakes with jam, fried eggs and bacon, Welsh rarebit and a bowl of custard. Miss Fatt was eating perhaps even more now that she was miserable, for she had lost her chance to play the sexy, sinister villainess in Lethal Weapon VI. A week away from shooting, the casting director had caught sight of her new shape and immediately cancelled her contract, employing in her place another slender young woman with long legs, big breasts and a face like Marilyn Monroe’s.
Friends advised her to sue, but in their heart of hearts they thought she had only a dubious moral right to win.
‘Are you all right?’ they asked her, meaningfully.
Since then, Miss Fatt had been playing sexy overweight women in commercials. The directors were just as pleasant as ever, but Carp and Bravitt tried to point out to her, in a subtle way, that she couldn’t reasonably expect their firm to secure as many assignments for her as before.
‘The use for big women in advertisements is limited, Suzie. You’ve either got to lose some weight, or do some serious thinking.’
‘Serious thinking?’
‘You could give up being sexy altogether. I could put you down in the books as a “housewife and mother” type. You know the kind of thing: sensible perm, cheap floral dress, spreading margarine on the kids’ sandwiches with a golden sunny halo all around you … Chucking dirty clothes into a washing machine to a choreographed dance routine … Can you still dance, love?’
‘No,’ sighed Miss Fatt ‘Not really.’
‘Well,’ said Carp, a shadow of distaste crossing his face. ‘Think it over anyway. But, you know, the best thing to do would be to lose weight.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ promised Miss Fatt, but she knew that eating less was out of the question, and it was getting more difficult to exercise, what with the bulging belly and the expanding bosom. Her actor friend had broken off with her just at the point where she was seriously considering going to bed with him; the reason he gave was that he couldn’t afford to refill his refrigerator several times a week. This was the first unkind word uttered to Miss Fatt since the change in her condition had begun.
The first unkind word uttered to Miss Thinne came soon after, when one of the elderly ladies whose malnutrition she was trying to correct pushed a plate of food away and jeered, ‘Who are you to say I don’t eat enough?’
‘I … I’m sorry,’ grimaced Miss Thinne.
Fifth Month
The 25th of August Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne spent at home, for it was a Sunday.
Ordinarily, Miss Thinne would have gone out to play the oboe with the Catholic Women’s Sinfonia, but she’d had to resign from the group because she no longer had the lung-power to inspirate the instrument.
Miss Fatt would probably still have been working on Lethal Weapon VI, if she hadn’t been disqualified. Mind you, by now she was no longer even what her actor ex-friend had described as ‘a bit gross’. She was rather gross. Her cheeks were filling out and merging with the new fullness of her neck and chin; on the rest of her body a number of bones had disappeared, in the sense that they could be found only by determined palpation. A long crease trapped sweat and talcum powder under her belly, and her breasts sagged under their own weight. Her usual attire was no longer a Wonderbra and fashionable gear; it was floral dresses and a sarong which Miss Thinne had given her for her birthday some weeks before. All the clothes that no longer fitted her they’d already given away to charity shops, thus revealing their unspoken shared assumption that she would never be a size 12 – or even 16, for that matter – again. Giving away the twenty-one pairs of unwearable shoes was, well, almost unbearable, but what hurt most was having to put away all her rings (no, she would not sell them – not yet) for fear that they would strangle her fingers.
As far as her work went, she played only fat women now, usually in humorous contexts. She had sworn off drama since she had landed the role, in a TV movie, of the fat older sister of a beautiful young girl. The part had required of her a Poisonous Jealousy which took advantage of the younger sister’s low self-esteem to make the girl feel unattractive, unloved and ungrateful. It had seemed a good enough role, but the director’s method in coaching Miss Fatt had consisted of exhortations like:
‘Come on, Suzie. Remember you’re fat and revolting. You want her to feel as repulsive as you are – it makes you feel better. See the psychology?’
Miss Fatt was determined to stick to roles in commercials in which she could smile in floral dresses and be invited afterwards to have a cup of tea with the other extras.
She might
have considered giving up work altogether, as the amount of exercise she had to do in order to maintain her fitness for it was torture, but, more than ever, the two women needed the income from their jobs. Not only did their grocery bill continue to increase almost daily; but they’d had to buy a whole set of larger furniture for Miss Fatt to sit in, and a number of giant soft cushions for Miss Thinne, to protect her protruding bones from bruising.
One day Miss Fatt came home to find Miss Thinne still lying in bed, too weak to get up.
Shrouded by the sheet, her body looked like a skeleton, but once uncovered by Miss Fatt it didn’t look too bad: no thinner, surely, than that of a healthy seventy-year-old. As for Miss Thinne’s weakness, she’d merely left the bowl of celery slivers too far out of reach. A nibble or two and she was on her corrugated feet again, ready and able to prepare Miss Fatt’s mid-afternoon roast.
Sixth Month
On the 25th of September Miss Fatt visited Miss Thinne in hospital.
She came by public transport, having some time ago sold the car, partly to raise money for food, and partly because she’d been having trouble squeezing herself into the driver’s seat.
‘Hello, Eleanor,’ she said at the foot of the hospital bed where Miss Thinne lay naked, her bedclothes thrown aside because of their weight on the starved white limbs. ‘How’s the leg?’
Miss Thinne had fractured her tibia in a fall, easily. The plaster cast resembled one of those white thigh-length boots Miss Fatt had once sported in an ice-cream commercial.
‘Home in a week or two.’
Looking up at her visitor, Miss Thinne didn’t by any means feel herself to be the more unfortunate of the two. Tears came to her eyes as she observed how ugly Miss Fatt was becoming. Her eyes were piggy, her mouth a puffy rosebud marooned in an expanse of mottled pink. The dowdy lace and wire of a huge bra from a charity shop peeped out above the folds of her birthday sarong which, unbelievably, was now too small. She seemed condemned to exude a morbid sexual grossness while Miss Thinne, naked as she was, seemed utterly sexless. Even so, the nursing staff found it in their hearts to say about her: