Fat

by Rob Grant

  The first stirrings of claustrophobia could no longer be ignored, now. Grenville was not a serious sufferer. He hadn't, in fact, experienced claustrophobic feelings at all before the weight had started piling on. But it gets to be a genuine threat, when you reach a certain size, that you might seriously manoeuvre yourself into a spot from which you really cannot extricate yourself. It's a real danger, and from such things a phobia can form. He was beginning to sweat, and his hands were starting to shake. He felt he might vomit, even. That would be good. That would help his case no end. To be led into court jiggering like a victim of St Vitus's dance, with great dark damp patches under his armpits, puke stains down his jogging-top logo, smelling strongly of sweat and vomit and Lord knows what other bodily excretions. It had been a serious mistake not to swallow his pride and ask his ex to fetch a change of clothing. But then, come to think of it: how would she have got into his flat? How would anybody? The entire arrest procedure was not designed to accommodate single, friendless men who didn't have phone directories tattooed on their bodies.

  He twisted round painfully, given the confines of his cubicle, the Henry Moore sculpture that was now his spinal column and the problems he had twisting round even under perfect conditions, so he could look out of the window behind him, and perhaps find some succour in the evidence that someone, somewhere was living a normal life.

  The glass was tinted, so he could see out, but passers-by could not see in. And there it was: rush-hour London. People scurrying about, smelling of too much aftershave and cologne, with Starbuck-coffee breath. Normalcy. God, he wanted to be out there with them, with nothing more to worry about than being slightly late for work. They had no idea, those blissfully normal people, how unbelievably lucky they were. No idea.

  He was only just below the stage of screaming abdabbery by the time the prison van pulled in at the rear entrance of Highbury Corner Magistrates Court. They were herded from the van -- yes, herded: what were they now, but animals? -- and handed over to a real policeman. Grenville never thought he'd be so glad to encounter one again, and less than half an hour after he'd been wishing to see them all writhing in the mighty conflagration of hell's own ovens for all eternity. He was cuffed again, but this time he managed to pin one side of his jogging bottoms with his elbow, and so was spared the indignity of having the entire criminal fraternity of North London inspect his sweaty boxer shorts.

  He was led down yet another dingy corridor, and once again compelled to remove his trainers -- what, in the name of all that was holy, did the Metropolitan Police have against footwear? -- and deposited in yet another cell.

  This one, incredibly, was even less well appointed than the last, and even smaller. It made his previous cell look like the presidential suite of the seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. This one didn't have a window. It didn't even have a loo, which, seriously, was currently a fairly desperate requirement for Grenville, whose bowels had been considerably loosened by the trip in the convict carrier. It had the obligatory torture bench, though it was not quite as generous and opulent as the one on which he'd spent a small part of the previous night.

  He sat down on it anyway. There was nothing else to do. He prayed his case would be heard soon, because another hour or so in this purgatory, and he would start seriously thinking about attempting bungee suicide with the elasticated drawstring the careless fools had let him bring into the cell in his pocket.

  And his prayer was answered. Maybe God was genuinely scared of the kicking Grenville had promised Him. He was taken from the cell, and even given a chance to freshen up before he was led to the court, uncuffed, clean, and trainered-up, where he met his legal representative, one Charles Whitman.

  Whitman nodded and didn't smile or crack one of his famous non-jokes.

  Grenville just stared in disbelief for several seconds, unable, even, to utter the words: 'Excuse me, Atticus, but didn't I sack you?' But finally, he managed.

  Whitman looked around for someone named Atticus, then turned back. 'I didn't think you meant it. I thought it was in the heat of the moment, as it were. With the red mist clouding your... uhm...'

  'No, no. I really did mean it. In all honesty, I don't think I've ever meant anything I've ever said before with more passion or commitment.'

  'Oh dear. Whoops, sorry about this, but there is no-one else. You'll just have to make do with little old me,' and he chuckled at that little nugget, let me tell you. 'Unless you'd like me to get the case adjourned until you can bring in your own counsel?'

  Well, Grenville had a serious decision to make here. Postponing the case might very well entail a return to the holding pens for heaven knew how long. And more jogging-bottom disasters. And more shoe removals than you could shake a stick at. And he would probably have to stay in the same clothes all the time, since there was no one on the entire planet Earth he could call to fetch him a change. And another trip in the rape wagon -- no, two trips, at least. And at least one more night on the torture bench, possibly more, and as far as he was aware, medical science had not yet arrived at a suitably advanced state where spine transplants were commonplace.

  On the other hand, he was being represented by Dylan Thomas, here, whose undisputed idiocy could not be concealed for an instant, even by the thick veil of a mother's love. Assuming, that is, he was indeed of woman born, and not crafted by a deranged scientist from a collection of human dingleberries that had been somehow brought to life in an accident with lightning, which seemed infinitely more likely. Having his case pled by this incompetent dunderhead might very well lead to a considerable stretch in a real prison. By nightfall, Gren could very well be lying in the loving tattooed arms of a neo-Nazi axe murderer who'd claimed him as his bride.

  It was a tough call.

  But he had the scent of freedom in his nostrils. Standing outside the courthouse in the open air had given him a taste of it, and he wanted it so badly, he couldn't bear the thought of one more second in captivity. In his mind, he was already in the familiarly comfortable cocoon of his own living room, showered lemon clean and resplendent in the flowing folds of his beloved kaftan, tucking into a GI-friendly yoghurt, shaking his head wistfully as he chuckled to himself about the whole lunatic affair, which had so very quickly become just a sepia-toned memory. Which, incidentally, is precisely where he would have been almost twenty hours ago were it not for the sterling legal talents of this nincompoop, and he would have been spared most of the more extreme of his tribulations.

  He just wanted the damned business over with. 'Fine.' He nodded.

  'Fine, you want a postponement?'

  Grenville closed his eyes shook his head. Life must be a wonderful, thrilling mystery, every waking moment, to this goldfish-brained moron, who seemed, literally, to understand nothing, ever. 'No. I'd like you to represent me.'

  'Good, then let's get this over with and get you out in circulation again.' He cracked open his briefcase. We just have to--' And his phone went off. He held up his hand, flicked open the brand-new mobile and checked the caller ID. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I really need to--'

  'No, you don't,' Grenville said with murderous calm. 'You really don't.'

  Whitman looked into Grenville's face and finally understood something. 'You're right.' He smiled. 'It can wait.' And he flipped the phone closed and turned it off.

  The trial was nothing like Grenville had imagined. There were no impassioned pleadings, no clever witness interrogations -- and were you wearing your prescription spectacles at the time of the incident? -- no objections, Milud. Nothing clever or, in fact, interesting. He himself was not even called to the stand. The charge was read out, Grenville's genius lawyer simply pled guilty, which, surely, Washoe the chimpanzee trained to use sign language could have done, statements were read, and Whitman asked for clemency, on the basis of Grenville's previous unblemishedness, which, again, Washoe the signing chimp could have accomplished with ease. Grenville was fined two thousand five hundred pounds for his work in the car park, and subjected to a co
mpensation order of five thousand pounds. He was fined a further one thousand pounds for the police interrogation room shenanigans, with another compensation order in the amount of six hundred pounds for the furniture damage there, which seemed a bit steep; it wasn't as if the chairs that had been smashed had been priceless Queen Anne antiques. In fact, a quick trip to IKEA could have refurnished the entire station for a little under forty quid. The magistrate also felt duty bound to pass on the advice of one DC Redmond that Grenville might consider some anger management therapy.

  And that was that. He was a free man. He was a much poorer free man than he'd hoped, but that couldn't be helped.

  He shook Whitman's hand, such was his relief.

  Whitman smiled, and said, 'Well, I think that went well, under the circumstances,' and apparently there was another hidden joke in that sentence, too.

  It seemed like a lot of money to Grenville. He asked Whitman what would have been the maximum fine he could have expected.

  Whitman had to check. 'Let me see: maximum fine of two thousand five hundred, and compensation order in the amount of... five thousand pounds.'

  'So, wait: you're saying I was given the maximum possible fine?'

  Whitman kept staring at his book. 'I suppose you could look at it like that.' He chuckled.

  What other way was there to look at it? The dozy bastard, far from being free, had cost him over eight grand, one thousand six hundred pounds of which were unarguably directly attributable to him, personally. Free? It would have been cheaper for Grenville to hire Rumpole of the Bailey and Kavanagh, QC to defend him in tandem. But he said nothing. As he turned to go, Whitman coughed and said: 'There is just one, final thing...'

  Grenville turned and Whitman handed him a slip of paper.

  'It's a... small matter.'

  It was a bill for a mobile phone.

  Perhaps Grenville ought to take up DC Redmond's suggestion, after all.

  He stepped out into the free air and sucked in a great lungful of freedom. The traffic fumes at Highbury Corner never tasted sweeter. He glanced at his watch. Not quite ten a.m. He could treat himself to a nice, GI-compliant breakfast on Upper Street or he could head straight home. He decided on home. He could freshen up, call the studios and be back in the saddle, recording his show this afternoon, with nobody on the production team any the wiser, and very little damage done, all things considered.

  He headed happily for the Tube station, passing, en route, the news stand. A billboard caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared at it.

  Bold as you like in that crazy fake felt-tip scrawl was the slug line: 'TV CHEF IN CAR PARK RAMPAGE'.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Jeremy got off the Tube at Leicester Square and walked through Soho, up Wardour Street and turned right onto Broadwick Street. On the corner, at the intersection with Lexington Street, he found the pub. It was quaint and Olde Worlde, clad in good polished wood, with Victorian-style lanterns bathing the name in a warm golden glow in this early winter twilight. The name was 'John Snow'. Not 'The John Snow Public House' or 'The John Snow Inn', just plain old 'John Snow' in gold letters, repeated on both facades and again around the curve on the corner. It looked like a sturdy old place. It looked like Jack the Ripper might have sunk a few flagons in there. Jeremy checked his breath, then touched his hand to the armpits of his Paul Smith shirt and sniffed his fingers. Satisfied he was, indeed, a world-class sex machine, he tugged open the door and went in.

  It was fairly busy, as most of the pubs in the area would be at this time of night, even on a Wednesday. City workers and media folk, reluctant to go home for various reasons, flocked to the wine bars and ale houses of Soho, and kept them busy from about lunchtime to midnight. You go into a pub in Soho in the afternoon and it's empty, there's probably something seriously wrong with it. Definitely do not try the chilli.

  Through the crush he saw Jemma, sitting at a table, studying the Evening Standard intently, occasionally marking it with a pen. He fought his way over to her, to see if she wanted a drink. She smiled, very nicely, when she looked up at him, and she not only already had a drink, she'd got him one in, too. Carlsberg Extra Cold, if that was all right. Which it was. Jeremy sat and sipped.

  'Nice pub,' he said.

  'You've never been before?'

  'Didn't even know about it.'

  'I wanted to meet here for an interesting reason.'

  'Are you OK, Jemma? Only you sounded funny on the phone.'

  'We'll get to that.' She smiled. 'First, let me tell you about John Snow.'

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows, intrigued, and sat back with his pint.

  'In the mid-eighteen hundreds, the most serious disease round these parts was cholera. It was extremely contagious, extraordinarily nasty, incurable and almost always fatal. At the time, we didn't understand anything about the ways contagious diseases were communicated. Conventional wisdom was they were passed by the inhalation of vapours. John Snow was a local obstetrician -- he was actually a pioneer in anaesthesia -- and he had a different theory: he thought cholera created poisons in the human body that emerged in the vomit and faeces, which were then passed on in water supplies contaminated with these products. At the time, there were lots of alternate theories flying around, and his was just one of many.' She paused and took a sip of wine. 'Anyway, there was a massive cholera outbreak in 1854 in the Soho area, and Snow got his chance to test his theory. He made a note of all the cases in this area, and worked out that almost all the victims drew their water from a standpipe just outside this pub. So he removed the pump handle. Voila! The epidemic stopped.'

  'Amazing.'

  'There's a replica of the standpipe outside. You probably saw it on your way in.'

  Jeremy nodded. He hadn't.

  'It was one of the most sensational intuitive leaps in medical history, and it changed the future. It saved millions of lives. Millions. Removing the Broad Street pump handle is up there with the discovery of penicillin.'

  'So you're saying, in the middle of the nineteenth century, people were drinking water contaminated with raw human sewage? With vomit and shit?'

  'Hard to believe, I know, but it wasn't until around twenty years later that local authorities were legally compelled to provide safe, clean water. And it all started outside this pub.'

  Just over a century before Jeremy was born, people living in the greatest city of the greatest empire the world had ever seen were literally drinking piss laced with diarrhoea. 'Shit,' he said, involuntarily.

  'So Snow became the founding father of a new branch of medical science: epidemiology. And if he could see what they do with it today, he'd be spinning in his grave.'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'I'll tell you,' she pushed forward her empty glass, and smiled, 'when you bring me back an Oyster Bay merlot.'

  Jeremy jostled his way to the bar, and returned with their drinks. He didn't particularly enjoy being lectured to by Jemma. Not that he wasn't interested in the stuff she told him. It just didn't seem to put the relationship on the correct footing, for his liking. It made him seem stupider than her, which he probably was in her chosen field. Still, she seemed to need to talk, though he doubted what she really needed to talk about was John Snow and the Broad Street pump.

  'Epidemiology,' he reminded her as he sat down again.

  'Right. Chapter two: Austin Bradford Hill. He does not have a pub named after him, to my knowledge. Just after the Second World War, it transpired that lung cancer cases were fifteen times more frequent than they had been twenty-five years earlier, and no one knew why. Hill was a professor of medical statistics, and the Medical Research Council asked him to look into the lung cancer escalation. Now, at the time, pretty much everyone smoked. Smoking was not thought to present any kind of danger at all. In fact, some adverts actually promoted some brands as having health benefits. Hill and his team conducted a massive trial on forty thousand doctors over the course of eleven years. He did it by post. They found that
, on average, seven of the non-smoking subjects died each year from lung cancer per hundred thousand, compared to a hundred and sixty-six smokers. That represents twenty-four times more risk for the smokers. It was hailed as a major breakthrough, and again, it changed the world. Unfortunately, not for the better.'

  'Of course it was for the better. Who knows how many lives that saved?'

  'Well, it may have saved lives. Probably saved quite a few, in fact. But the repercussions were definitely not healthy. For a start, everyone now believes that cigarettes cause lung cancer.'

  'Well, they do. It's on cigarette packets, isn't it?'

  'It is. If you can actually find a packet of cigarettes, this day and age. Everyone believes it. You hear that somebody has lung cancer, your first question is: were they a heavy smoker? But the truth is, all Hill proved is that smoking cigarettes is linked to lung cancer.'

  Jeremy shrugged. 'Pretty much the same thing, isn't it?'

  'No, it's a completely different thing. You remember that example I gave you about bald men not living as long as hairy men?'

  Jeremy did, and again the reference caused an unwilled movement of his hand through his hair. 'Sure.'

  'All that shows is that baldness is linked to a reduced life span. It does not suggest that baldness kills, that if a hairy man shaved his head, he'd be shortening his life. Baldness is not the mechanism. The mechanism is probably high testosterone levels. All Hill's results demonstrate, at best, is that smoking may possibly be connected to the mechanism that causes lung cancer. To this day, nobody knows what that mechanism might be.'