Fat

by Rob Grant

  'Sure, it's a little heavy on the tough love,' Jeremy said. 'But desperate measures for desperate times.'

  'Well, it worries me. It worries me a lot. There's something about the whole attitude here. They're too... confident. Too sure they're right.'

  'What did Stone mean when he said they weren't going to start people farming for "obvious reasons"?'

  Jemma smiled grimly. 'Because they don't want the public to think of these places as "work camps". That's their nightmare, right now: that people will start comparing them to Concentration Camps. That would kill the project stone dead before it could get off the ground.'

  Yes, it most certainly would. You would not get a great many people volunteering for Concentration Camps. Definitely not a good idea, then, to go with the slug line: 'Fat -- The Final Solution'.

  They strolled on and came across a stream. It might have been a romantic moment but for a cluster of workmen, who seemed to be stocking it with carp. For some reason, the men were wearing hard hats. Again, why did anyone need hard hats to handle goldfish? Were the carp psychopathic? Were they armed with clubs, or something?

  'The thing is,' Jemma plucked a reed from the banks of the stream, 'I'm pretty sure they're not right.'

  'Not right about what?'

  'About any of it, quite frankly. Look, they have this bee in their bonnet about obesity being an epidemic and a major health hazard and the biggest threat to human longevity in the twenty-first century, and I don't know exactly what they're supposed to be basing it on.'

  'What are you saying? There is no obesity epidemic?'

  'Look, for a start, there's very little evidence that being overweight is as terrible for your health as it's made out to be. In actual fact, it's much, much unhealthier to be even a few pounds underweight.'

  'You're joking.' Jeremy looked around nervously. Were there microphones as well as cameras in these woods? This was heresy in these parts. Blasphemy, almost.

  'I joke not. It's true across the board, but especially in older people. Over sixty-five, underweight is a killer, but being overweight, even by as much as forty pounds, actually improves their life expectancy. Quite dramatically, too.'

  'I'm not sure that's right.' Jeremy wondered if they were far enough away from the stream stockers not to be overheard. He quickened his pace.

  'Well, I am. And I do have the advantage of having actually glanced at the statistics. But, OK, I don't want to argue with you. I can email you the references when we get back, if you like. But let's say there were an obesity epidemic, and it did put the population in mortal danger. What on Earth would you do about it?'

  'Well... this.' Jeremy waved his arms. 'You'd help people to get thinner.'

  'Fine. The problem is: short of radical surgery or permanent starvation, it's incredibly difficult to lose weight and then sustain that weight loss. Diets don't work in the long term. They pretty much all work at the beginning, but over the long haul, they just don't. If they did, everybody would be able to lose weight, and I'm pretty sure very few people actually want to be obese. I'm pretty sure there are very few obese people out there who haven't had a serious stab at dieting already. Ninety-one per cent of successful dieters regain their original weight within a year. And almost always, they actually become heavier than when they started. I have yet to see a study that follows what happens to the other nine per cent, but I'll bet the attrition rate over a decade is pretty high. The chances are these "Well Farms" will actually wind up harming people.'

  Now Jeremy was really getting nervous. He pretended to scratch his forehead, as if shielding his face from any prying cameras might somehow help. 'Surely, if diets don't work, it's because people stop sticking to them.'

  'Look, we've been attacking this "problem" for over a century now, and getting precisely nowhere. We've spent billions upon billions researching the causes and cures of "overweight", and it's become clear that most of our assumptions are pretty much, if you'll forgive me, fatuous. Take calories. Calories are a measure of heat energy. In dietary terms, they refer to the amount of heat energy the body needs to generate to eliminate particular foods. You know this, right?'

  Jeremy nodded.

  'Well, the theory is, fundamentally, calories in, calories out. If you expend more calories than you take in, you lose weight. You take in more than you expend, you put weight on. Sounds blatantly obvious. So obvious it's been accepted and acted on for over a hundred years. The problem is, the calories in/calories out theory treats the human body as if it's a machine. What's more, it treats all human bodies as if they're the same machine. And after a century of research, it remains unproven. The calorie equation doesn't seem to hold true. The simple truth is, telling people to lose weight by eating less and exercising more is unproven and probably just plain wrong, and, in actual fact, probably quite dangerous.'

  'What, so now we shouldn't even exercise?'

  'That's not what I'm saying. Exercise is great. It's bad to overdo it, but moderate regular exercise will definitely have a beneficial effect on your health. Just don't expect it's going to help you lose weight, that's all.'

  She was saying all this quite matter-of-factly, as if she was utterly unaware that she was systematically attempting to demolish the logic behind the entire enterprise on which they were now employed.

  And, of course, Jemma being Jemma, she didn't stop there. 'Look, even if you fly in the face of all these arguments and insist that being fat is unhealthy, you are then leaping to the conclusion that a fat person who loses weight will automatically assume the health characteristics of a naturally thin person, which is not necessarily the case. Here's an example: bald men don't live as long as hirsute men, in general.'

  Jeremy ran hand through his hair, involuntarily. 'Is that true?'

  'As I say, in general. It's probably because they have higher levels of testosterone, which appears to lower life expectancy. Now, nobody in their right mind would suggest that giving bald men hair implants would somehow bestow on them the same life expectancy as a naturally hairy man, now would they?'

  'Of course not, no.'

  'But we're making precisely that logic error when we try to make fat people thinner. Unfortunately, nobody's ever conducted a study to test whether such a transformation does affect people's life expectancy in a positive way.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because nobody knows how to turn fat people into thin people.'

  NINETEEN

  Soooo. They had recorded Grenville's entire non-rampage on closed-circuit cameras. The whole thing.

  That was probably not very good.

  He hadn't seen any cameras. But then, he hadn't been looking for them. What was it with this car park? Were they secretly running the Royal Mint from some obscure corner of it or something? They had more security than Heathrow Airport, Belmarsh Prison and the Crown Jewels room of the Tower of London combined. Grenville had probably been lucky not to get mown down by some guard in a camouflaged machine gun post armed with a Kalashnikov, or speared with a pike by a hidden Beefeater.

  For the benefit of the audio tape, Redmond announced that she was starting up the video.

  The show started with Grenville parking in the crche space. The camera, of course, was perfectly placed to capture every single detail. It was shooting down from a high angle directly onto the scene, the lighting was good, the focus was superb and it was even in colour. Trust Grenville's luck to pick a day when Stephen Spielberg was directing the CCTV cameras.

  As Grenville disappeared into the leisure centre, the 4x4 pulled up.

  Now, Grenville started thinking this might be a good thing, after all. Now everyone would see the intolerable provocation he'd been subjected to. Now they would understand. Now he would be vindicated. Bring it on.

  He watched himself emerge from the building. He looked like he was already in a fairly foul mood, which was odd -- he didn't remember that. And then the interchange with the Medusa began, only, damn it, there was no sound. Well, of course. Why would Grenv
ille be thinking he might actually catch a break?

  Worse still, the camera was slightly behind the woman, shooting over her left shoulder whenever she faced Grenville, so most of her venomous expressions and the more frightening of her Gorgon looks went unrecorded. Grenville -- and why would it have been any other way? -- was, in contrast, in full view at all times. And it didn't look good. He thought he'd been a lot calmer, a lot more collected and reasonable than this. It didn't look like he was calm, collected and reasonable. It actually looked like he was a short-tempered vicious bully harassing a harmless mother who was struggling to protect a helpless infant. That's what it looked like. There had to be some way to prevent this footage being played in court. Surely there was some clever lawyerly loophole that could render it inadmissible. Grenville shot a quick glance at Ezra Pound, who actually seemed to be enjoying the show. He looked like he might reach into his briefcase at any moment and produce a bag of popcorn. Grenville would definitely have to get another lawyer.

  Then the show really hotted up. They got to the start of Grenville's not-a-rampage. The first impact looked amazingly insane. He was truly grateful, now, that the footage had no soundtrack. It was a monstrous collision that rocked the 4x4 and all but stove in the back of his own car. The second impact was, if anything, worse. Forget Spielberg, this had to have been directed by Quentin Tarantino.

  Then there came the bollard-busting sequence. He had rammed the bollard many, many more times than he'd remembered. He must have blanked that bit out. It took about ten attempts to knock it over. He'd then dragged the dead bollard under his car and onto the pavement. He had no recollection of that bit whatsoever. Then there was the squeezing the car through the space between the remaining bollards bit. When you saw it from this angle, you could plainly see the car was never going to fit through, not even nearly, and, although there was no sound, Grenville found that the mind could not help but conjure up the dreadful screech of tortured metal as the smoking car crunched through.

  Well. That was that. It wasn't good, it was pretty damning, obviously, but at least he was about to tootle out of the frame, and that was a small blessing. But no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Mercy me, no. The shot changed. Tarantino had, presumably, yelled, 'Cut!', the shot hand changed and they were now looking down at the exit barrier. Again, the lighting, the angle, everything was perfectly in place to capture Grenville's wreck of a clown car trundling up, smoke and steam a-billowing from his ruined bonnet.

  And he hadn't stopped, as he'd imagined, to try to remember the security number, he hadn't even slowed down, just kept right on trundling towards the barrier, and -- Jesus H. Christ! That looked bad. That looked very bad indeed. The windscreen warped and crumbled and then shattered into billions of fragments, the bonnet buckled and wrenched itself clear of the car and the security barrier went flying through the air, spinning, in what looked, to Grenville, suspiciously like slow motion, directly towards the camera. Forget Tarantino. This work bore the unmistakable hallmark of the master of disaster, John Woo. And Grenville found his mind was dubbing on its own soundtrack: the gigantic smash of the glass and the tinkling of the falling shards and a sort of lazy whump, whump, whump as the arm spun languidly through the air towards the viewer and, yes, the barrier's arm smashed into the camera and the screen went dead.

  Well. Perfect. Academy Awards all round, Grenville was thinking. Best Action Movie, Best Horror and the coveted trophy for Most Convincing Impression of a Deranged Berserker for his own mantelpiece. He'd better start writing his acceptance speech.

  He looked around at his not-the-poet lawyer, hoping his previous impressions of the man might have been misbegotten. Hoping that, now the man was in the arena of his professional expertise, he might somehow find another gear, that he might somehow turn out to be Atticus Finch in disguise. That he would lean forward and say to the detective, with a confident smile, in the soft tones of an educated Southern gentleman, 'Of cowahse, you realise, Ma'am, that undah tha East Finchley Leisure Centre Code of 1862, and the Barnet District Penal Act of 1736, not one single frame of this sorry little brouhaha is admissible in a cowht of lawah. So, if that's all the evidence you have in this mattah, you might cayuh to return mah client's personal accoutrements, wayupon the payuh of us will be compelled to take our leave of youah delightful companeh.'

  Instead, the man was moronically staring at the blank screen with his mouth open, like some poor, lobotomised creature from the very deepest cellars of Bedlam. When he finally gathered the few shreds of what only the most generous observer might call his 'wits', he turned to Grenville and said: 'Well, if that's not a rampage, I don't know what is.'

  TWENTY

  Hayleigh kept her eyes straight ahead and tried to walk as upright as possible as she passed through the school gates. Technically, she wasn't allowed to leave the school environs at lunchtime -- that was a privilege reserved for Year Eleveners -- but she often got away with it. If you didn't make eye contact with anyone and the teacher on duty was distracted, or just plain lazy, and you did it with confidence, you could usually pull it off. Today, she simply couldn't afford not to pull it off. She had made an unbreakable promise to a certain Mister Jason Black, and they would have to throw an animal capture net over her and shoot her with elephant tranquiliser darts to stop her from keeping it.

  She crossed the road carefully and made a beeline for the newsagents. All that nonsense with the apple and whatnot had left her very little time to accomplish this desperately important mission and get back in time for, ugh, gym class.

  There was a handwritten sign on the door, and very poorly handwritten it was, too: 'only TWO school kid Allow in the shop'. It annoyed Hayleigh for very many reasons. Which two school kid were allowed in the shop? Did these two blessed individuals know who they were? And why only them out of all the school kid who might want to spend money in the shop?

  She didn't have time for such speculation now. She opened the door, and the bell rang. The Mumbling Man behind the counter looked up, but didn't smile, of course, then went back to fiddling with his pricing gun, like he was Wild Bill Hickok cleaning his six-shooter, only, from what Hayleigh knew about how much he charged here for a small pack of Kleenex, the pricing gun was probably a much deadlier weapon than anything ever dreamed up by Messrs Smith and Wesson.

  She scanned the magazine racks. There was a picture of Courteney Cox Arquette on the cover of OK!, looking divine, as usual, in a low-cut red dress. She had a fabulous cleavage, and yet you could clearly see practically her entire ribcage. How did the woman do it? Big boobs, skinny body. You have got to take your hat off to that kind of dieting genius.

  And there he was, on the cover of Chick Chat. And look, he was on the cover of Teen Talk, too. Could she afford both? She dived into her purse, and yes, she had enough, so long as the Mumbling Man accepted the one euro coin, which, she believed, he was compelled to do by European Law, or the International Court of the Hague or Amnesty International or some such. She grabbed the mag, and, wait a minute, who was that on the cover of Teen Talk, arm-in-arm, no less, with Jason? Staring dreamily into his eyes? Could it be that total cow Amyline from the dreadful girls' band Gurlz Banned? And what was the headline? 'Jase & Amyline: Some Kinda Lurve?' I think not. I think that belongs deep in the realms of notness, high atop the palace of notitude.

  She put the magazine back, of course, gingerly, as if its cover had suddenly turned toxic. She wouldn't be spending the euro coin right now, and she certainly would never be spending any coins on that particular periodical ever again in history, not even if they put out a special Big Boys Cry edition with a hundred posters of all the band butt naked. She took Chick Chat to the counter, and it wasn't until the Mumbling Man asked if she was all right that she realised she was crying, quite profusely. Some of her tears drooled off her chin and onto the Evening Standard early edition, still bundled and bound with string by her feet, and made quite a loud plop.

  She nodded and fished up her cardigan sleeve for her hankie.
<
br />   Silly. She was being silly, and she knew it. She couldn't expect Jason to be a complete Benedictine monk until he met her, now could she? Of course other girls were going to try to snare a dreamboat like Jason. Of course he'd feel flattered by their attentions, even if they were really ugly, talentless slags. She might as well get used to it.

  She blew her nose and collected her change. The Mumbling Man asked her again if she was all right, and she said she was fine and thanked him. Odd, he'd never said two words to her before. When did he turn into Care Worker of the Year?

  The shop door jangled and she stepped onto the street. The fresh air, laden as it was with gasoline fumes and carbon monoxide, felt good anyway. It cleared her head. She had been very foolish blubbering like that, like a pathetic schoolgirl. The whole Amyline slash Jason business was almost certainly a publicity stunt, anyway. For sure, in fact. Engineered, no doubt, by their respective weaselly managers. Of course it was. And Jason probably hated every minute of the dreadful photo shoot. It was probably purgatory for the poor lamb. Every minute of it. She hoped they hadn't made him pretend to kiss the sour-faced vache. That would be too cruel.

  By the time she'd got to the kerb, all was forgiven. She could never stay mad at Jason for long. Not even when he'd done that stupid stuff with the drugs and punched that photographer. She looked up at the school clock, but couldn't quite focus at first. She rubbed her eyes. Blimey, it was one-thirty already. Disasterama.

  She crossed the road just a little too quickly, and a man on a moped had to swerve to avoid her. He braked screechily a few yards on and started yelling all kinds of vile things at her, but Hayleigh didn't stop, just carried on running through the gates, past mad old Madders on playground duty, who also started yelling at her, but she just kept running, and, out of the corner of her eye she saw something impossible, but no, that could not be, and she couldn't stop to check, but, of course, she had to, so she slowed slightly and turned her head and stopped altogether and turned and froze and was instantly transformed into a citizen of Gobsmackville, Arkansas.