by Michel Faber
‘Isn’t she creepy?’
And about Miss Fatt:
‘What a slug. ’
Seventh Month
By October 25th Miss Fatt was no longer playing fat ladies in commercials.
She had, in fact, been removed from the books of Carp & Bravitt. Striving for a tact so impossible to achieve that he soon abandoned the struggle, Bravitt told her, at first, that it wasn’t worth her while to be kept on the books, given how rarely the firm would be able to find work for her. Then, when Miss Fatt made the mistake of pleading with him, he told her she was not the sort of person, physically speaking, that Carp & Bravitt wanted themselves associated with.
Thus ushered into the ranks of the jobless, Miss Fatt waddled to the employment office, which was located (luckily) only a few doors along from Carp & Bravitt’s office building, so that she didn’t have far to travel in order to get the news that she was no good to anyone.
Riding home on the bus, the stamp UNEMPLOYABLE burning on her forehead, she was far too hungry to feel as awful as she should.
Limping with a stick and still in plaster, Miss Thinne was allowed to go home on the understanding that she would rest up, subsisting on sick pay.
Unfortunately, this was out of the question. She just couldn’t do without her overtime and penalty rates – if anything, she needed a raise to fund Miss Fatt’s ever-growing appetite. So, impressively sprightly in her slimline plaster cast, she returned to work, shocking her old colleagues.
‘Lovely to have you back, Eleanor,’ they winced.
The Eleanor they had back was a startling bird of prey, with teeth advancing as the flesh of the face retreated, ears like curls of pink wire, and pop-eyes.
Soon enough reports were brought back of Eleanor’s inability to nurse owing to her frailty and, more damningly, to her appearance frightening the people she was supposed to be caring for. With the utmost sensitivity and goodwill she was therefore relieved of her duties.
Eighth Month
By November, Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne were practically fugitives (if such a word can be applied to people who rarely move) from the ant-eater snout of hospitalisation. They lived in fear of some officious social worker calling on them and ‘assessing’ them as unfit to stay at home.
Their metamorphosis having advanced swiftly, they were now utterly dependent on one another for simple survival. Miss Thinne had to be fed when she was asleep, or she would retch convulsively at the prospect of eating. Lukewarm vegetable soup poured carefully into her mouth in the middle of the night smuggled enough nutrients into her body to keep her alive, though she would wake up coughing and spluttering, glaring at her ministering companion in fear and outrage before coming to her senses.
Lately, she had the bewildering sensation that there were only a few thousand proteins, vitamins, minerals and whatever else floating about in her body, and that she could actually feel these being consumed and extinguished one by one.
In the daytime she would go out to the corner grocer to buy food. Unemployment benefits were hardly enough to cover this expense, but extra money had been raised through selling off everything except the bed, the cushions and the cooking equipment. Even so, they had to be disciplined in their budget: only powdered soup, potatoes, rice and oats were worth buying these days, as anything else was eaten too quickly, and with too little effect, to justify the increasingly frail Miss Thinne carrying it home.
Finally, on the 25th, Miss Thinne collapsed at the shop, fracturing two of her ribs on the grocer’s burly arms as he leapt forward to catch her. Desperately though she tried to leave for home, she lost consciousness in the attempt and was, instead, promptly removed to a hospital.
Mere hours later, Miss Fatt’s helpless bellowing for food provoked neighbours to call the police, so that she, too, ended up being taken to a hospital, albeit a different one.
In Miss Thinne’s hospital, staff of various ranks said:
‘Don’t you worry, dear: you’ll be right as rain in no time.’ Or:
‘Well then, Eleanor, you haven’t been taking very good care of yourself, have you?’
After a day or two, no longer to her but in her earshot, they said other things too, like:
‘Progressive lipodystrophy.’
‘Hypophyseal cachexia.’
‘I think the little bitch must be taking something to flush the IV fluids through her system without absorbing them. Search her bedside locker.’
In Miss Fatt’s hospital, Miss Fatt was not addressed directly even in the beginning, because her problem was diagnosed as being mental in origin rather than physical. The fact that no one tried to communicate with her didn’t matter much anyway, since she might not have been able to listen: her ears were swelling up into little puddings. She certainly couldn’t hear the farrago of diagnoses and recommendations her doctors were thinking up for her in faraway parts of the building.
‘Prader-Willi Syndrome.’
‘Glandular dystrophy.’
‘Staple her stomach.’
‘Shorten her intestine.’
‘Step up the reducing diet.’
‘Suprarenal tumour.’
‘I’d go for Cushing’s Disease myself.’
Miss Fatt, for her part, had only one thing to say, only one suggestion to make.
‘Feed me!’ she cried. ‘I’m hungry!’ Her voice was squashed into a hoarse bleat by the fat in her throat pressing in on her vocal cords.
‘You’ve had your thousand calories,’ snapped a nurse. ‘At breakfast.’
‘Then kill me!’ sobbed Miss Fatt. ‘I want to die!’
‘Don’t be stupid, Mrs Fatt’ was the nurse’s retort. Like all the nurses, she found the fat woman in Room 13 monstrous and loathsome, but felt professionally obliged to pretend that she found her merely annoying and difficult, in case the patient might be shamed into making a recovery.
Ninth Month
On December the 25th, Miss Fatt lay on a cot, or rather two cots pushed together, in the psycho-geriatric wing of a large hospital far from the residential part of town. She was naked, not because of her almost constant feeling of suffocation, but because no institution nightgowns were big enough to fit her and, as no one was paying for her stay, it wasn’t worth getting one specially made.
Miss Fatt was under treatment for suicidal tendencies arising from her delusion that she would continue to gain weight no matter how little she was given to eat or how many experimental drugs she was injected with. The room in which she was locked was free of edible substances and sharp implements; free of everything, in fact, except for the cots and a naked lightbulb overhead.
Trapped inside a quivering mass of fat, the tortured spirit of Miss Fatt was capable of nothing but stubborn outrage.
‘I – need – food!’ was all she said to her keepers, her voice almost strangled to a squeak.
‘You’re just an animal,’ a nurse accused her one day, as she warily cleaned up the enormous droppings smeared all over Miss Fatt’s cot-sides. Her slim, well-proportioned body was trembling with disgust and awe.
Others said: ‘Slut.’
Others said: ‘Cow.’
Miss Fatt just lay there, waiting for her meals. Her only distractions from the unbearable hours of longing were her agonies of breathlessness, headache, angina, sinusitis and thrombosis. The doctors were making bets among themselves as to what would be her eventual cause of death, and thrombosis was the favourite. Miss Fatt had heard one of them prophesy as much, while he was kneeling at her feet, examining her blubberous legs. He smelled strongly of an aftershave which Miss Fatt had once nuzzled in a TV commercial. Perhaps the seductive eyes, the bee-stung lips, the subtle cleavage of her former body had persuaded him to try that aftershave, once upon a time. Now here he was, dwarfed by her mass, telling her she would die soon of thrombosis. She ignored him, secure in the knowledge that she would not die of thrombosis or anything else he could understand: she would die of her unique condition. Only at mealtimes did she glimpse
death, knowing that the food she wished for so desperately would kill her by and by.
Miss Thinne was supposed to be dying in an inner-city cancer hospital, but on this Christmas night, taking advantage of the relaxed security procedures on Jesus’s birthday, she was instead able to be elsewhere.
She was in a taxi speeding towards Miss Fatt’s hospital.
Her ischia, jutting out through her fleshless buttocks, made shallow dents in the cab’s back seat as she excreted the last of the intravenous fluids from which she had disconnected herself hours before. A stolen overcoat hid from the driver’s notice both her nakedness and the fact that she was too wasted to live much longer.
Having reached the hospital gates, Miss Thinne swung open the cab door and limped without paying into the dense, unlit greenery. There she waited, not breathing, listening for the sound of the taxi driving away.
As soon as the air was silent she walked up to the long cast-iron fence and slipped through the bars, needing only to shed her coat to achieve this feat of insubstantiality.
She didn’t need to be told where Miss Fatt lay imprisoned: this final meeting was as inevitable as the metamorphoses themselves.
‘Suzie’
Miss Fatt’s slit eyes looked up at the high but unbarred window and saw, poking through there, the face and arms of her companion. Only the hair and skin lent some recognisable individuality to what was otherwise the common human skeleton.
‘You’ve come,’ squeaked Miss Fatt.
Miss Thinne heaved herself on to the window-ledge like a nightmarish white praying mantis, and lowered her spindly legs carefully down into the dark and humid room. Her forklike feet dangled more than a metre from Miss Fatt’s helplessly supine body.
‘Can’t reach,’ panted Miss Thinne.
‘Just let yourself fall.’
Surrendering her balance on the window-ledge, Miss Thinne allowed herself to drop, landing safely on the soft mound of flesh below.
Sprawled on top of Miss Fatt, who had so very much flesh and no discernible bones, while she had such very obvious bones and hardly any discernible flesh, she understood for the first time that the way they had become alienated from each other was strangely natural, like the separation of liquid from solid in curdling milk.
Both exhausted, they lay together, silent, while in the corridors outside, Christmas carols were sung to those patients for whom there was deemed to be some hope of remission. A faraway firework lit up the outside world and cast a rectangle of bright light on Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne. For the last time they tried to use their estranged bodies to show their love for one another, but for the first time this proved impossible.
‘I’m so hungry,’ lamented Miss Fatt, the tears trapped in swollen creases at the corners of her eyes. ‘But I know that if I eat anymore, even one more thing, I’ll die. I mean it.’
‘I know.’
‘My heart will just stop.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you? ’
‘Me? I’ve … had enough.’ This statement alone drained Miss Thinne perfectly white, her pitiful reserve of moisture and pigment apparently exhaled along with the words. Then finally:
‘There it goes …’
She meant the last of the contents that had nourished her, and indeed her body started shuddering, as if the bones were claiming their right to break free from their flimsy prison of skin.
‘Feel free …’ were her last words.
‘Yes … yes …’ said Miss Fatt, inside herself only. Outside, the Christmas carols were sounding fainter as Miss Thinne’s body grew still, and they had faded away altogether by the time Miss Fatt lifted the dead hand gently to her lips.
Half a Million Pounds and a Miracle
ROBBIE AND MCNAIR knew the job was going to be trouble when the Virgin Mary fell off her pedestal and smashed to smithereens right in front of them.
‘What do you think?’ said Robbie, when they squatted down to examine the rubble. He could see very well the statue was beyond repair, but he felt he ought to defer to his boss’s experience and authority.
‘It’s grit for roads now,’ frowned McNair, turning little fragments of the Virgin over and over in his massive hands. ‘Dr Prosser won’t be pleased.’
Dr Prosser was the ancient official who’d contracted McNair to oversee the renovations to St Hilda’s, a fine Victorian church which had lain derelict for most of this century. Funding had finally been found to rescue it from total collapse – half a million pounds’ worth.
McNair had had reservations about the job from the start. His company’s trade was restoring neglected old buildings, true, but he’d only done a few churches, none of them Catholic, and none of them in such a rotten state of repair that roof slates fell through the ceiling and you walked ankle-deep in pigeon shit and the statues were liable to brain you.
‘Have you not got any Catholic fellows for the job?’ he’d queried Dr Prosser.
‘None here in Ross-shire,’ sighed the bureaucrat.
‘To do this place up,’ McNair had warned, ‘you’ll need more than half a million pound, you’ll need a miracle.’
‘We’ve applied for more funding next year,’ said Dr Prosser. ‘That’s how it’s done. A year at a time. Just do the best you can to begin with.’
So McNair had taken on the job.
And regretted it almost immediately. At this stage, weeks in, he’d only just finished clearing the place of debris; he’d had to sub-contract a lot of extra labourers, and many overloaded garbage skips had been carted away. St Hilda’s was still a disaster area. The inner walls were full of holes, spilling out the disintegrating straw its builders had used for insulation. Half the floorboards were rotten, including (probably) the ones underpinning the splendid old stone font. Every structure, surface and fixture in St Hilda’s seemed to be in a sort of renovator’s Limbo: too frail or damaged to keep as it was, yet too solid and expensive to rip out and replace. The stained glass in the windows, for example, was a showpiece of Victorian craftsmanship – a pity only a few jagged bits of it had survived.
McNair and his apprentice, Robbie, stood in the nave of the church now, dead centre, deciding where to go from here. They’d spent thousands already and the place only looked sadder and emptier. McNair asked Robbie if he had any ideas.
The lad kicked pensively at the thick layer of pigeon cack on the floor.
‘I reckon the only way to get this off is to plane it,’ he ventured.
McNair sighed. He’d been hoping for something a bit more inspired than that.
‘Why couldn’t they have ploughed the money into Scottish industry, eh?’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Think of how many jobs half a million pound would create, eh?’
Robbie frowned, trying to imagine how half a million pounds might create jobs. It was as difficult as imagining how water could be turned into wine.
‘They could have built a … a shopping centre, mebbe.’
‘Eh?’
‘In a place that hasn’t got one. Uist, mebbe.’
‘Eh? What are you talking about?’
‘I was in Uist once. The shop was always shut by the time I could get myself out of bed. I could’ve starved.’
Feeling the weight of McNair’s incredulity, Robbie didn’t say anymore. The effort of thinking of a way to turn money into jobs had exhausted him. Personally, he didn’t see why, if there was a half a million pounds going spare for some Highland town, it couldn’t just be distributed equally among the sparse population. Who’d need jobs then?
Another idea Robbie had for what could be done with half a million pounds was maybe building a giant cinema complex in some place like Invergordon. All right, so it just happened to be where he lived himself, but it would get loads of customers from the ships and the rigs, surely. Everybody was desperate for something to do.
Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way. It was the sort of disco where no alcohol was allow
ed so everybody made sure to be thoroughly drunk before arriving. Robbie had searched the entire hall, from wall to wall, to find a girl who didn’t look as if she was about to fall asleep, or vomit, or bite him in the neck. He’d found just one. She was very short, seemed very nice, was very bored. She asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a stonemason, that he was doing up a church.
‘Oh, that sounds interesting,’ she’d said.
‘Em … it’s pretty boring, actually,’ he’d replied.
‘Oh,’ she’d said, looking away slightly and tapping her foot to the mechanised beat from London.
Looking back on it now, Robbie couldn’t understand why he’d said his work was boring. Shyness, he supposed, because it wasn’t true. The challenge of making St Hilda’s look like a proper church again – and not just that, but a different kind of church from the ones he’d grown up with – was pretty exciting, really. Re-attaching an intricately carved corbel, disguising the join with a cunning glue made of dust from the original stone mixed with cement: now that was satisfaction.
As for the problem of the smashed Virgin, Robbie got on to that promptly. Aware of McNair watching him in what he hoped was admiration, he consulted a telephone book and, using his mobile phone, called a church on the island of Barra, seeing as how it was such a Catholic place, and old-fashioned enough to have a Virgin of the right vintage.
‘Hello there,’ said Robbie, when he’d got through. ‘We’ve had a little accident here at St Hilda’s Church in Ross-shire. Yeah. And what I was wondering is, have you got any Virgin Marys you don’t need?’