Fat

by Rob Grant

  Just as she finished, the second, slightly more impatient shout rang up the stairs. Hayleigh ran out onto the landing calling: 'Coming, for God's sake!' and was halfway down the second flight before she remembered the magazine and had to spin round and double back, a manoeuvre that was guaranteed to provoke a minor curse of impatience from her waiting mother, but there was no avoiding that.

  She grabbed Chick Chat and bounded down the stairs again. 'Forgot my mag!' She grinned, grabbed the school-bag her dad was proffering and stuffed the carefully packaged contraband inside with casual haste. Again, job done.

  'You'd forget your head if it wasn't screwed on.' Her dad chuckled limply.

  'It's not screwed on,' Jonny chimed in. 'She's a bloody mentalist.' He started crabbing down the hall sideways in a wild exaggeration of Hayleigh's own movements earlier.

  'Look at me, I'm Crab Woman. I'm the mighty Crab Girl. He spun and threw himself forward so he bodysurfed on the hall floorboards back towards the door. 'Weeeeee. I'm a crime-fighting idiot. I'm Moron Girl.'

  Now, here's an odd thing. Although she wanted Jonny to die, and if she could have pressed a button that would make him drop dead on the spot right then, she would have had her thumb on it and been pressing like fury, Hayleigh actually thought he was being quite funny. She actually smiled.

  Mum and Dad looked, quite frankly, baffled. If she had to speculate, Hayleigh would have guessed they were more worried about Jonny's sanity than hers.

  Dad coughed nervously, 'Uh, Jonny...'

  Jonny straightened himself at the door and struck a superhero pose. 'I'm Mental Girl! I have the secret power to creep sideways down the hall.'

  'That's great, Jonny.' Dad patted him on the head. 'But here, on planet Earth, we have to go to school right now.' And he shoved Jonny in the back, gently propelling him through the open door.

  Jonny ran down the drive to the ridiculous eco-unfriendly 4x4, singing, 'Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Mad Girl!'

  Dad held out his arms to Hayleigh, so she was able, legitimately, to race past the mirror with her eyes on Dad and leap into a hug. One potential crinkle moment averted, thanks to Jase, then she pelted off to the car.

  Hayleigh climbed into the ridiculously huge back seat of the gas-guzzling monster truck. She always allowed Jonny the dubious privilege of riding shotgun in the front, though it was technically her birthright as the eldest sibling. She didn't mind, because (a) it was easier to find a spot in a mirror-free zone back there, (b) any so-called 'erratic' behaviour on her part would be less noticeable and (c) it was slightly less likely Mum would lecture her in the rear position. Slightly. She also had fewer distractions and could concentrate on the wonderful advertising billboards that lined the route to school, and admire all those countless beautiful models and actresses with impossibly heavenly body shapes that Hayleigh could never dream of aspiring to in her wildest imagination.

  Well, it had been a fairly typical morning, fraught with danger, anguish and near-death experiences, as per. But a reasonably successful one, so far. Calories consumed: zero. Fat intake: zero grams. Carbohydrates: nil points. In the minus column, of course, one ruined magazine, one small incision on the palm and...

  Hayleigh's stomach somersaulted.

  She had left the knife and the plaster box in her bathroom.

  ELEVEN

  The living quarters were prefabricated buildings, with very few frills. They were basically dormitories with a large sitting area attached. Jeremy assumed they were being taken around the 'show' barracks because there were a few incongruously lavish homely touches in what otherwise looked like a POW camp.

  Stone was talking all the time in a more or less bored drone, depending on his personal interest in the facts and figures he was dispensing, interrupted by the occasional exchange with one of the many groups of hard-hatted workmen still labouring on the final touches. Jeremy hoped there would be some kind of handout at the end of the tour because he had no chance of remembering absolutely any of it.

  The place was laid out with cold efficiency. Jeremy suspected the architect had been German. All the buildings were ruthlessly symmetrical. They were clustered into groups which led to a central point, like spokes in a wheel. The central points were like mini town squares. Each had a gym complex -- each gym brutally stocked -- a cafeteria, which was starkly over-lit and uninviting, quite deliberately so, Jeremy assumed. No venue for leisurely feasts or romantic tete-a-tetes, this. There were shops, mostly as yet unstocked, though the unit next to the gym entrance boasted a wide array of oversized jogging outfits and exercise suits in gaudy colours, and even had prices on display. The prices were marked in an unfamiliar currency, which Jeremy found vaguely disturbing.

  'Uh, Pete: what are these prices? Jogging top log? Tennis racquet 1K?'

  'Right. Normal currency can't be used here. Instead, residents have to earn credits in local currency. They earn those credits by losing weight. Each one has a fitness account and a credits card, which they insert at their daily weigh-in. You lose weight, your account gets credited. You gain weight, it's debited.'

  That sounded a little draconian to Jeremy. 'So, you lose ten grams, you can buy a jogging top? You lose a kilo, you can get a racquet?'

  'Exactly.'

  'What if you're just not losing weight?'

  Stone shrugged. 'Then you can't buy anything. Should be a great incentive.'

  'So, what other kinds of shops will you have?'

  'Oh, clothes shops, outsize clothes shops mostly, of course; electronics shops, you know, for iPods and step-counters, personal heart-rate monitors, that sort of thing. There'll be music stores, bicycle shops--'

  Jeremy grinned. 'Sweet shops?'

  'Definitely no sweet shops. No food shops of any kind outside the cafeterias.'

  'And people have to pay for their food, too?'

  'Not in so many words. They all have a food allowance, which is integrated onto their credits card. Their personal evaluator sets their daily diet limits, so it's virtually impossible to go off programme.'

  Jemma interjected, 'I think you'll find that's a trifle optimistic. People being people, there's bound to be some kind of black market, some kind of peer-to-peer food trading.'

  Stone nodded. 'We expect a degree of that, at least. But the way things are organised, someone's going to have to starve for someone else to overeat.'

  'Unless,' Jemma suggested, 'someone starts smuggling food in. From the outside.'

  'That's possible. Corrupt staff. It could happen. But nobody's allowed to eat outside the cafeterias, and everyone eats at set times. You get caught eating outside of that, you'll lose all kinds of privileges. And there are CCTV cameras everywhere.'

  'Even in the loos?'

  'Everywhere.'

  'And who's monitoring them?'

  'Each of these communal centres has a monitoring room at the top, each with a hundred and fifty screens, each screen divided into four. There are crews of ten monitoring officers, each on hour-on, hour-off shifts, and the rooms are manned round the clock. You can't wipe your backside here without it going on report.'

  'Well, this is new.' Jemma looked grim. 'Big Brother is definitely watching us.'

  Stone shook his head. 'We don't like the Big Brother reference. It really has negative connotations. This is not for public consumption. Jeremy -- we really don't want this whole monitoring business mentioned outside of this conversation.'

  'Don't worry. I'm not insane. I'm here to sell this idea.'

  Stone brightened. 'Of course. That's good. Plus, if residents start overeating, we can assume they'll start putting on weight, lose credits and have nothing to trade. I think it's about as foolproof as a system can possibly get.'

  Jeremy changed the subject. 'What about cinemas? TVs? I didn't see any screens in the living areas.'

  'No TV. We definitely don't want to encourage couch potato-ism. What we're aiming for, really, is lifestyle change for the clients. Lifestyle change they can take home w
ith them. There's a large cinema room in each communal area. We may show a movie one day a week, but it'll probably cost a lot of credits to get a ticket. Mostly, we'll be showing sporting events, which will be cheaper for residents. Of course, there are screens in the gym. You can watch Richard and Judy, so long as you're clocking up seven kilometres per hour on the jogging machine.'

  'I like the lifestyle-change element.' Jeremy took out his notepad. 'That will definitely play.'

  Jemma asked, 'What about books?'

  Stone shook his head. 'Not as such. No bookshops, no libraries. Again, we don't want to be encouraging any kind of sedentary behaviour. Here and there, some in-house publications. Health education. Pro-exercise literature. That kind of thing.'

  Jemma grinned charmingly. 'Why, Peter Stone, I do believe you mean "propaganda".'

  Stone grinned right back at her. 'Hey, if trying to bring sick people to health makes me Goebbels, then hang me at Nuremberg.'

  Jeremy finished scribbling. 'So what do the residents do all day?'

  'Well, they exercise. They exercise a lot. At least two gym sessions a day. They insert their credits card into each work-out station, and the levels and duration of each exercise are monitored. They're not allowed to leave the gymnasia until they've met the targets set by their personal evaluator, and they get double credits for everything over that. And they eat, of course. We've tried to make that particular experience as unrewarding as possible, for obvious reasons. The cafeterias are not an environment where many people would want to linger. The seats are uncomfortable -- in fact, most of the seating in the village is deliberately uncomfortable -- and the decor is unappealing. In a way, we're hoping we might engender a kind of negative Pavlovian response to eating in general, and we're hoping that response stays with clients when they leave.'

  'Fit for life?' Jeremy offered.

  Stone grinned and said with genuine admiration, 'You're good. That's a great slogan. Use it.'

  'I will, don't worry.'

  Jemma piped in: 'What about sex?'

  Jeremy turned to her, quick as a whip. 'Not now, Jemma, there's people watching.'

  Jemma laughed and punched him on the shoulder. That was good. That was a good sign.

  Stone said, 'Actually, we want to encourage sex. It's terrific exercise, you know. We plan to have dances every night. Dancing is great exercise, too.'

  Jemma asked, 'Alcohol?'

  'No. No alcohol. No drugs. We're zero tolerance on that one. There will be therapy sessions for addicts, group and individual.'

  Frankly, Jeremy thought that the prospect of morbidly obese people having sex without the aid of alcohol or drugs was extremely unlikely, but he asked anyway: 'And the people who do have sex, they'll be monitored on CCTV, presumably?'

  'Unfortunately, yes. But those portions of the recordings will be wiped immediately.'

  'Theoretically,' Jemma said. 'Human nature being what it is, though, you can't help thinking some of those sessions will show up on a security guard compilation video.'

  Stone shook his head. 'Not a chance. Anyone tries pulling that number, they'll wind up doing prison time. Just for watching it.'

  Jeremy said, 'Someone will have to watch them to wipe them.'

  'That's unfortunate, I agree. But I don't see what we could do about it. Maybe we'll think about providing unmonitored sex zones, but off the top of my head, any exceptions like that will be open to massive abuse.'

  Jemma nodded. 'Absolutely -- people could cheat their way into the sex zones and have a full-on chocolate orgy instead of shagging. The dirty bastards.'

  Jeremy loved a girl who talked dirty. 'What about work?'

  'Well, at first there will be opportunities to volunteer for maintenance work and earn extra credits. General cleaning and so on. More opportunities for people with skills: electricians, plumbers and such. In the long term, though, we see no reason why the Well Farms can't be self-sustaining. They're all constructed on good farmland. We could have our own organic produce. Even chickens and dairy cattle. And farm work is hellishly good exercise. But that's for later. For... obvious reasons, I think.'

  The reasons were not obvious to Jeremy, but Jemma was nodding, and he didn't want to look thick, so he gave a curt nod, too, praying that Stone didn't ask him what the obvious reasons might be. It seemed he'd underestimated Jemma, pigeon-holing her as a mere 'student'. She was clearly exceptionally bright, and Stone was paying her a great deal of respect. Obviously, the job title 'research assistant' had more cachet in the scientific community than it did in his own.

  Their wanderings through the mall had brought them to an intriguing-looking shop not yet stocked: Rock Stop.

  'You'll be selling musical instruments?' Jeremy asked.

  'Absolutely.' Stone nodded. 'Electric guitars, basses, drums and such. We're hoping residents will form bands and play at the nightly dances.'

  'Violins, clarinets...?'

  'No. Just rock stuff. The PM's a big fan of rock music, plus it makes the place a bit funkier. But none of that chamber music crap. Nobody ever got fit playing the bloody piccolo.'

  'What about policing?' Jemma asked. 'I mean, a community this size, there's bound to be crime. Do you have an onsite police presence?'

  Stone shook his head. 'Look, this is a voluntary community. We don't anticipate much in the way of serious crime. But we do have a relationship with the local police force. We have a panic button, and they undertake to be onsite within twenty minutes. Plus, we have our own security guards.'

  'But they don't have the power of arrest? There's no detention cells?'

  Stone shook his head again. 'It's a health farm, Jemma. When did you last see a SWAT team descend on Clivedon?'

  'Well, I think you're making a mistake.' Jemma smiled grimly. 'A very big mistake indeed.'

  TWELVE

  Hayleigh was in a fugue of despair. How could she have been so careless? And today, of all days. Wednesday was cleaning day. Mum would almost certainly be in her bathroom at some point. Would she work it out? The bloody blade, the plaster, the sanitary towel? Would she put those things together and work it out?

  Of course she'd work it out. Even dumb old dummkopf Lieutenant Randy Disher could probably work it out, low as he was in the detecting food chain.

  So now she had to come up with a seriously convincing alternative explanation. She'd cut herself trying to shave her legs. With a Swiss Army knife? Well, that would make her look stupid, but it would be less of a disaster than being caught trying to fake menstruation. But then there was the telltale plaster on her palm. Would that cut have healed sufficiently by the afternoon? At least enough to cover it with make-up, assuming she could get hold of some make-up? And then she'd have to cut herself again on the leg and re-use the plaster from her hand. And if both wounds were discovered, then it might look like she was self-harming, like Bella Goodwyn in year five last term.

  Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. At least they didn't try to make self-harmers fat. They didn't force feed self-harmers, as far as Hayleigh was aware.

  The Planetary Destroyer pulled up. Jonny leapt to his knees on his seat, said, slightly too loudly over the gangsta din from his iPod earphones, 'Thanks, Mum!' then swivelled round to face Hayleigh, chirped, 'Later, you mentalist,' and sprang out of the car.

  Mum turned round. 'Would you like to get in front, Hayleigh?'

  It wasn't a question. 'No, I'm all right here, thanks,' Hayleigh tried.

  Mum patted the seat. 'Front. Now.'

  Hayleigh clambered out of the car, slouched to the front and clambered back in again.

  Mum smiled. 'That's better. Now I can see your pretty face.' She brushed Hayleigh's hair away from her cheek and smiled a mumsy smile. She slipped the Sport Utility Behemoth into gear and burned off a few litres of non-sustainable fossil fuel. 'I want you to have dinner with us all tonight, darling.'

  Hayleigh tried not to let her expression slump, but she couldn't help it. 'Sure. No problemo.'

  'I
worry about you, you know.'

  'I'm fine, Mum. Really I am.'

  'And I want us all to have breakfast together.'

  'Tomorrow? Sure.'

  'Not just tomorrow. Every day.'

  Every day?

  'Don't look like that, Hayleigh. It's important family time. It's the one time we're all always around. We should all spend it together.'

  And do what? Watch Dad find new, previously undiscovered areas to scratch? Thrill to the endless taunts and jibes the performing monkey-boy Jonny would hurl at her relentlessly? Well, that would be fun. That would make a fine start to the day. Or they could just load five chambers of a revolver and force her to play Russian roulette every morning. 'Fine. That'll be great.' Hayleigh nodded with a poorly forced grin. She would probably have to put up with this ridiculousness for the rest of the week, then the rule would relax and she could get on with her own way of living her life again.

  That was assuming, of course, she survived the Swiss Army knife debacle.

  THIRTEEN

  The police intercepted Grenville's vehicle, if you could still call it a vehicle, on the entertainment complex roundabout. He hadn't spotted them in his driver's mirror because it had been tortured into a modern art sculpture by the exit barrier's surprisingly sturdy arm and was facing away from him; nor in his wing mirrors, because he no longer had any. He no longer had any wings. But he heard the siren very clearly through the gaping hole where his windscreen had been.

  They overtook him and turned on their stop sign, and he pulled over obediently and waited in the car, because he seemed to remember the police don't like it if you get out.