Fat

by Rob Grant

  Jeremy wished she'd stop bringing up that particular example. He was fairly convinced he was blessed with more than his fair share of testosterone. 'Twenty-four times more likely, though? That's more than "may possibly".'

  'It's an impressive figure, sure. But it depends how you look at the numbers. If you present them another way, they show that ninety-nine thousand, eight hundred and thirty-four smokers out of a hundred thousand do not contract lung cancer. That's over ninety-nine point eight per cent, and there were good scientists at the time who were asking why those figures weren't considered when the results were evaluated. In any event, the results were accepted, the conclusions drawn and a monstrous bandwagon was created.'

  'I'm not sure I follow you.'

  'For a start, it gave governments the green light to start interfering in our lives, in our behaviour and our habits -- all in our own best interests, of course. It sowed the seeds of the Nanny State. Everything from "don't smoke" to "don't drink", "don't spank your children", "don't use salt". Researchers everywhere wanted to get famous like Hill, and they all started panning for gold, trying to find their own route to the spotlight. They resorted to researching the looniest things: the precise shape of the perfect female bottom, for instance -- it didn't matter: anything to get them a grant and a shot at the top. Worse, they lowered accepted scientific standards in a desperate attempt to wring some tiny significance out of their wretchedly insignificant results. From Hill's twenty-four-times-increased risk, you now only have to prove a risk is less than twice as likely and you'll get published.'

  'What? So if it had turned out that two smokers out of a hundred got cancer, and only one non-smoker, that would count as proof now?'

  'The figures on passive smoking are even worse than that. And that's after undesirable results have been winkled out and discarded. Which is why you can read an article claiming that tea causes testicular cancer one day, and tea protects against testicular cancer the next. The way standards have eroded in epidemiology, if you try hard enough, and play dirty enough, you can prove that just about anything causes just about anything else.'

  'That's insane.'

  Jemma nodded. 'And those are not the only demons that flew out of Hill's Pandora's box. Tort law was born. American lawyers started prosecuting the tobacco companies, winning billions in tort cases, and whenever another link between disease and a product was "discovered", on they'd move like locusts. And we, of course, are pathetically following their lead. It also gave birth to the single-interest fanatic groups, such as the Soil Association, Consensus on Salt and Health, and Action on Smoking and Health: groups who weren't interested in balanced arguments or genuine research or serious discovery. All they wanted was to prove their case, and so they funded their own "research", the entire aim of which was to give them the results they wanted.'

  Jemma stopped her diatribe and leaned back in her chair. 'I surely can talk, can't I?' She grinned.

  'You surely can at that. But it is interesting. And scary, too.'

  'It's just that I am a scientist, and I love science. And I hate to see it being strangled this way.'

  'Ok. But I'm pretty sure you didn't invite me here just to teach me about cholera, vomit water and the evils of epidemiology.'

  'No. Well, actually, that was part of it. I sort of need you to understand those things. To understand where I'm coming from.'

  OK. Sounded like Jeremy was finally starting to get somewhere. Sounded like a prelude to something intimate. 'And the other part?'

  'I'm off the Well Farms project.'

  'What? You've been taken off the project?'

  'It's much worse than that. I've been given the total heave-ho. The Spanish fiddler.'

  'You've been fired from the university? Jesus. How did you manage that? I thought you had to practically kill somebody to get fired as a research assistant?'

  'You practically do.'

  'So, who did you kill?'

  Jemma shrugged. 'I didn't get a reason, Jeremy. I got in this morning, my stuff was in a box and they pretty much told me to fuck off. They said I needn't bother to hand in my thesis.'

  'That doesn't make sense. I mean, I don't know you all that well, but I imagine you're pretty good at your job.'

  'I'm very good at my job. They wouldn't have put me on the Well Farms project if I wasn't good at my job.'

  'So you've got someone's back up, then?'

  'Maybe.'

  'An old flame? Someone's, uhm, amorous attentions you've rejected?'

  'Nope. If it was that kind of thing, they'd have had to give some sort of explanation. Some reason, even if it was a spurious one. They'd be terrified of a tribunal. They hate that kind of publicity.'

  'What, then?'

  'I think they got pressure.'

  'Who from?'

  'It can only be from the people who are funding the Well Farms research project.'

  'But isn't that...? Wouldn't that be...?'

  'The Government, Jeremy. That would be the Government.'

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  'What about this one?'

  Hayleigh glanced over. Her mum was holding up a picture of Charlie from Busted. Yeah, right, she wouldn't even use that to wipe her derriere, thank you so very much. She shook her head.

  Mum clucked, disappointed. 'I thought you liked him.'

  Yes, about three years ago. When she was a kid, for heaven's sake. Busted weren't even together any more. Old people. You can't live with 'em, you can't chop 'em up with an axe, stuff their torsos into a suitcase and sling it in the river.

  'I'm not doing very well with this, am I? Wait -- how about this one? Dominic what's his name from Lost? You like him, don't you?'

  Hayleigh shook her head again. Dominic Monaghan was cute, agreed, and there had been a time when he might have warranted a fairly respectable position on her wall, or on her computer's screen-saver, but she had limited space here, and Dominic was not quite of sufficient lushness to make the cut.

  'You can't just have pictures of Jason thingumabob, Hayleigh, darling. It's just not healthy.'

  Hayleigh was, it seemed, destined for a fairly lengthy stay at the hospital. She had been given official permission to personalise one wall of her room, so long as such personalisation did not cause any damage to the decor, if you could call it decor, and Mum had offered to help her do it. But, in fact, she was just making the whole enterprise take twice as long, at least, with her ill-informed suggestions. Charlie from Busted? Good God, was he still alive, even?

  'Ah ha!' Mum pronounced with delight. 'Michael Chad Thingy. I know you like him.' She brandished the picture triumphantly.

  Chad Michael Murray. Yes, he had been Hayleigh's previous crush, and she still had a soft spot for him. And that was a good photo of the old dreamboat. It might just qualify. Hayleigh nodded grudgingly and held out her hand. Mum crossed over to her wheelchair and handed her the magazine.

  Hayleigh scrutinised the poster. It might very well be acceptable. She took out her clear plastic ruler and measured it. It could be no larger than half the size of Jason's smallest poster. Anything bigger would have been a clear and blatant challenge to Jase's unquestionable domination.

  Her mum looked on, clearly baffled and trying not to show it. Well, if she thought this was obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she should take a look in Livvie Davidson's bedroom some time. That place was literally a total shrine to Wentworth Miller. She had a Wentworth altar. Really: with candles and everything. She even had a box she claimed held a lock of Wentworth's hair she'd bought on eBay, which Hayleigh doubted very much was authentic since she'd never seen a picture of him where he actually had any hair, and no way Jose would Livvie let anyone actually look inside the box to verify its colour. No room on those walls for secondary crushes, let me tell you.

  Yes, the Chad Michael Murray pic was correctly dimensioned. It could go in that gap over there, near the corner and low down, of course. She pointed out the spot to Mum, who went to work with her scissors.

&nbs
p; Hayleigh had a metal plate in her leg. Can you believe that? An actual metal plate, held in by metal screws. She had a girder inside her. Can you even begin to imagine what that would do to her body weight? She probably weighed more than a London bus already. A London bus full of passengers, in fact. On top of which, they were now force-feeding her. Well, not exactly. They were forcing her to eat, which, if anything, was worse. If she refused, the deadly nose tube would be re-inserted and they would be free to pump anything they felt like directly into her stomach, and that had happened twice already, which was quite enough of that. So eating was the lesser of two very evil evils.

  And Mum was there at every single meal. Watching every single morsel on every single forkful. Didn't she have a home to go to? Hayleigh shuddered to think what the house would look like by now, with Dad and Jonny running the ship. You probably had to burrow your way in through piles of rotting garbage and ancient pizza cartons. And Jonny would doubtless be making full use of the opportunity to explore her bedroom, rooting through her most private things like a pig in the undergrowth. There was a lock on her five-year diary, but it was a fairly flimsy one, and Jonny had almost certainly worked out how to pick it by now. Her most intimate secrets were probably being posted on his blog site as we speak.

  No, wait. Mum would have taken her diary. Of course! And pored over every inch of it with a Sherlock Holmes-style magnifying glass. How could she have been so dumb as not to work that one out? That's probably how she knew Hayleigh had a thing for Chad -- there was an entire page in there where she'd practised signing Hayleigh Michael Murray, just to see what it looked like.

  Well, the joke's on you, Mum. Most of it, the reportage of Hayleigh's actual activities, was faked. Period pains, faked. Food eaten, faked. Tales of carefree fun, faked. Bouts of depression, unrecorded. She wasn't a fool. She wasn't about to risk that kind of stuff falling into the wrong hands. The worst she'd find, the only genuine stuff, would be some embarrassing poetry and song lyrics and florid prose, mostly dreamy speculation about the J boy.

  'Here?' Mum asked, holding Chad's picture in a primo position, dead centre of the wall. Hayleigh shook her head and pointed again to the correct spot. Mum moved it over, but it was still too high. Hayleigh waved her hand to indicate it should be lower. Mum found the correct spot and looked at her expectantly, and Hayleigh rewarded her with a curt, tight nod.

  The cow bag wasn't expecting Hayleigh to actually speak to her, was she? They could lock her up in this purgatory. They could force her to eat. They could fatten her up like a biblical calf. They could not make her enjoy one single millisecond of it. She would cooperate as far as it was necessary to avoid worsening her pitiful plight, but that's all they were getting, and not one iota more.

  And then, the dreaded moment. Mum was balling up a blob of Blu-Tack when the orderly arrived with the food trolley.

  Mum beamed brightly, as if the Queen of Sheba had walked in with her entire entourage, and said in a voice utterly choking with enthusiasm: 'Oh, look, Hayleigh. Lunch!' She would have used exactly the same intonation if the Lord of Hosts had suddenly appeared on the bed with His heavenly chorus of cherubim and seraphim.

  Lunch. Well, whoops a dee! Set off the firecrackers and roll out the orchestra.

  And Mum clapped her hands like a lovelorn schoolgirl. 'What's on the menu today, Benjamin?'

  And the orderly made a great big pantomime of raising the lids covering the plates, as per bloody usual, like he was the maitre d' at the Ritz, and faking a swoon in the sweaty steam that rose from under them as if everything on offer was really ambrosia and nectar, the Food of the Gods, instead of the filthy slop it actually was.

  'Well, today, mes dames, we have ze chicken fricassee,' Benjamin intoned in his dreadful fake French accent, 'or ze fish and ze chips.'

  'That looks fantastic. I'm starving. I think I'll have ze fish and ze chips, zank you. Fish is so good for you, isn't it, Benjamin?'

  'Oh, oui, oui, oui. It's so good for you, it should probably be illegal.'

  Why did they have to go through this dismal charade every single bloody meal? Did they really think she was so simple-minded she would fall for this pathetic little panto? Did they think the surgeons had removed her brain?

  'Which d'you want, Hayleigh? Yummy chicken or scrummy fishy?' Mum asked, foolishly forgetting Hayleigh could only nod or shake her head in response, and so offering two consecutive choices could only elicit a stonewall stare.

  'Would you like chicken, darling?'

  Well, now, let me see. Would you like us to beat you to death with this delicious hammer or would you prefer us to smash your brains out with this vitamin-enriched crowbar? Tough call. The fish, if you could get away with leaving the batter, was probably the lowest in fat and calories, but then there were the lethal chips and, unmentioned, peas. The chicken was fairly low in fat (it wasn't actually fricasseed, either, it was grilled) but it came in a God-knows-what chasseur-type sauce, and there was mash, deadly mash, and carrots.

  No, that sauce could not be trusted. Hayleigh shook her head.

  'The fish, then,' Mum said to Benjamin, because, of course, Hayleigh could not be allowed to refuse that. Hayleigh no longer had any will of her own, in case you were wondering.

  'Excellent choice, ladies. And from the dessert menu? The rice pudding is really, really nice. Honestly.'

  Mum glanced over at Hayleigh, but she knew better than to even try to offer her that particular death threat. She turned back to Benjamin. 'I think we'll have the fruit salad. It is only lunch, after all.'

  'Another good choice,' Benjamin said. 'It's fresh. I know because I opened the tin myself.'

  The two adult clowns found this a very funny joke indeed.

  'I'll see you in my dreams, girls,' Benjamin said, as per bloody, and waved and went, praise de Lord.

  Hayleigh looked down at her hands. They were clutching the arms of the wheelchair so tightly, the knuckles had gone bright white. And this wasn't even the worst bit. This was just the light-entertainment prelude to the worst bit.

  Mum brought over her tray and hooked it into its slots on the wheelchair. She'd even set a flower in an Orangina bottle on it. 'Would you like some orange juice?' she asked, knowing full well the answer would be in the negative. Hayleigh didn't even bother. 'Water, then.' Mum sighed. She crossed to the bedside table, poured a plastic glassful and set it down on Hayleigh's tray. Hayleigh knew this was another charade, Mum pretending to be disappointed she would only drink water, because it wasn't just plain water. There was stuff in there. You could taste it. Once she'd caught a glimpse of a bottle of it in Mum's bag, and she'd just managed to read the words 'fortified' and 'calcium' before the vache had managed to snap the bag shut, so no one was fooling no one here, milady. Hayleigh tipped it away and replaced it with tap water whenever she got the chance, which was not nearly often enough for her liking.

  She'd agreed she needed calcium. Apparently it was mostly calcium deficiency that had weakened her bones, blah blah, made sense. Boring but true. Well, fine. She'd agreed to take the supplements in tablet form, just to keep the peace, so long as she was allowed to read the label listing all the ingredients, of course. But it didn't stop there. They were always trying to sneak it into her diet in one way or another. Every morning -- every morning, mind you -- they made her drink an entire glass of milk. That was one of the very worst bits of the day, which was invariably made up completely of bad bits, one after the other. At first, they'd tried to give her full-fat milk. Full-fat milk. What was that about? A drink that boasted in its very name that it was full of fat. Well, she'd put her good foot down on that subject, and no mistake. She'd demanded skimmed, and they'd settled on semi-skimmed, as a compromise, but it was still an ordeal. The thing about milk: it tastes hideous even when it's fresh. If you take your time drinking it, sipping infinitesimally tiny amounts, with long breaks in between, it actually gets worse. After an hour or two, it turns into stale yoghurt. It's like sucking down a spittoon. And if you c
omplain about that, they just go and get you a fresh glass, and the whole thing starts all over again. The only, the absolutely only way to get through it was to imagine Owen Wilson in Starsky and Hutch is sitting on the bed in that daft cowboy disguise, saying, 'Do it! Do it!' in that silly voice, and you just do it, down as quick as you can, glug, glug, glug, and pray you don't throw it all back up immediately, so you have to taste it twice.

  Well, once you've gone through that, and you've taken the tablets, you'd think that would be enough, but no. They just had to try to sneak some fortified water down your gullet, too. There's such a thing as too much calcium, people. We've all gone calcium crazy, here. When she got a chance at a computer, she would definitely look up the symptoms of lactose intolerance on Wikipedia, to see if they were easy to fake.

  So, now they were all set for the Battle of Marathon that was lunch.

  Mum pointed her wheelchair at the window, so she could enjoy the full, unremitting bleakness of the view, and sat at the table with her own tray. And the deal was: mouthful for mouthful. It could, and often did, take hours. More than once, they had still been at it when dinner arrived. Insane. Is it not possible, not ever, to, once in a while, not feel all that hungry? Does everybody always have to have the appetite of a starving dog at a butcher's bin?

  But the rule, amongst many, many rules Hayleigh was obliged to observe if she wanted to escape the Snickers-bar-cake drip, was you have to eat at least two-thirds of the food on your plate. And you have to have at least one mouthful of everything. Everything. If a cockroach inadvertently wandered onto your plate, then woe betide it: it would have to be eaten.

  Mum was poised over her own plate with her knife and fork primed, watching Hayleigh's every movement with scrupulous intensity.

  Hayleigh prodded her food with her knife. Where to begin with this little banquet of horrors? Well, obviously, not the chips. The chips would definitely be constituting the bulk of her leavable third. Why did almost every meal come with some form of potatoes? Potatoes weren't really food. For a start, they weren't vegetables, they were tubers. Second, they belonged to the deadly nightshade family, and in Hayleigh's humble, anything with a family name of 'deadly' should probably not be eaten. They don't often quote the 'deadly' part on restaurant menus. Hmm. Wonder why? Third, they contained nicotine. Really. A portion of mashed potatoes was like spending a night in a smoky room. Why didn't they just give her a nice Havana cigar and have done with it? And last, but not least, the calories. The sheer audacious calories of the damned things. But she wasn't supposed to even think about calories. That was another of the many bizarre rules in the Alice in Wonderland world of Hayleigh Griffin.