Fat Chance (6 page)

‘There you go!’ Ali exclaims and offers me a hand. I take it and he pulls me to my feet.

I become horribly aware that everyone is looking at me. Even Roger, who is still holding up the fallen end of the gazebo, is staring through his superhero mask.

‘Sorry, everyone,’ I repeat, hands held up.

Eileen bustles over. ‘Don’t worry, Greg!’ she says. ‘Those chairs were cheap from B&Q. I’m surprised one of them hasn’t collapsed under anyone else!’

Except it didn’t, did it? It happened to
me
.

The fat one.

I’m no heavier than Ali, but because most of my weight is
blubber
and his is still muscle, everyone will think that the chair only broke because I’d squeezed my enormous bulk into it.

That’s the way it goes. Fat people are always the heaviest ones in the room. Even when they aren’t.

I turn to my wife. ‘I think I hurt my shoulder, sweetheart. I’d like to go home.’

My shoulder is fine, but Zoe gets the point instantly. ‘Okay, honey. That’s fine.’

As Roger reassembles the gazebo as best he can, and puts
everything
back where it should be, my wife and I make our excuses to everyone. Most people look like they believe the bad shoulder story, but I’m sure they know the real reason we’re leaving with such haste. The permanent red flush of embarrassment on my face is a dead giveaway.

‘You sure know how to fuck up a party!’ Ali comments as I grab our coats.

‘Thanks, mate,’ I say, not entirely keeping the hurt out of
my vo
ice.

‘Ah, don’t worry about it,’ he adds. ‘I got so drunk at a party once I threw up over the record player. People were ducking to avoid the sick as it spun off the turntable.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Bloody hilarious, it was.’ Ali grins and slaps me on the back. ‘I’ll see you in the pub Sunday, you big dickhead.’

And with that, he turns and hurries back to the alcohol ta
ble, no d
oubt to take advantage of the fact that everyone else is
distracted
.

‘So sorry to see you leave,’ Eileen says by the front door, with a grimace.

‘Yeah, hope that shoulder is alright,’ Roger adds, having come away from his repairs to see us off.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I tell them. ‘Thank you for having us . . . and apologies once again.’

Roger waves his hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’ll make a great story in the future!’

Oh yes. I can’t wait to hear you telling everyone at work, Roger.

Zoe says her goodbyes as well, and we make our way back to the car in silence.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say as she opens her mouth.

‘Okay, baby,’ Zoe replies and strokes my arm as I start the engine.

I feel such a combination of shame, regret, and humiliation as we drive home. It is a wonder I don’t crash the car into the nearest wall.

So there you go.

That’s why I’ve agreed to do this stupid competition.

I just can’t keep living like this.

If doing what Zoe wants means I can go to a party without destroying half the furniture, then I’ll be a happy man.

Besides, it might put
that
smile back on her face, and I haven’t seen it in such a long time.

Nonetheless, I still have deep,
deep
reservations about the whole thing.

I guess only time will tell.

ZOE’S WEIGHT LOSS DIARY

Tuesday, April 8th

13 stone, 10 pounds (11 pounds lost)

I
’m starting to think this was a really bad idea.

We’ve had a month to get used to being on our diets, and in the glare of the local media. If the rest of the competition goes the way these first few weeks have, I may need to check into the nearest psychiatric hospital imminently. I’m all for dropping five stone, but not at the expense of my mental health, thank you very much.

The actual diet bit of the competition is relatively straightforward. I was expecting to be under the constant watchful eye of some kind of horrendous personal trainer, but Stream want our weight loss programmes to be similar to the type an average audience member would be able to manage, which means going it alone to a large extent. Of course, we have the carrot of fifty grand dangled in front of us. I’m pretty sure most people would stick to a diet better if they had that kind of motivation. I’ll trade an extended stomach for an extended house any day of the week.

I was slightly disconcerted by the amount of paperwork we had to sign at the start of the whole process. Lots of indemnities and contractual stuff I probably should have read more closely before putting down my signature. I have no doubt that at least some of it stipulated that Stream could not be held responsible if I starve myself to death or if blow an artery during exercise.

While the diet is straightforward and pretty much under my control, my new-found local celebrity is anything but.

The first time I saw my face on a billboard in town was so exquisitely dreadful that it almost reduced me to tears. I knew they’d be using our likenesses for advertising and promotion when I signed the contract to be part of the show, but I thought it would be largely confined to the website and some of the local papers. I clearly wasn’t prepared for the scale of this enterprise. No event that I’ve been involved in at the station has been on this scale before, so I guess I lulled myself into a false sense of security. More fool me.

They’ve really gone to town on this bugger, though. It feels like they’ve thrown more cash at it than a Hollywood movie company would at a blockbuster.

Everywhere I look I seem to see billboards, advertising banners, flyers, posters, and cardboard standees—a majority of which feature my ugly mug.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope with this kind of local
celebrity
. I know damn well that Greg won’t.

I know one other thing for certain. If I hated Mondays before Elise convinced me to take part in Fat Chance, I loathe them with a passion that’s almost holy now.

Quick side note: Who thought the title
Fat Chance
would be a good idea? I’m willing to bet all the money in my bank account that it was a thin person. They probably thought it sounded extremely clever, without taking into account the fact that it sounds pretty fucking
unkind
to those of us taking part.

Anyway, Monday is ‘check in’ day at the radio station, where we go all on the Elise and Will morning show and chat about how our weight loss programmes are going. If it wasn’t bad enough that I have to spill my guts in this diary all the time, I also have to
stammer
my way through a mini-interview with my so called best friend and her effeminate co-host at the start of each week.

And while Elise is a lovely person off air, once you stick a microphone in her hand she turns into the kind of door-stopping aggressive journalist that cheating politicians have come to know and fear.

A good case in point was yesterday’s show.

It was our third appearance on the radio, and by now Greg and I are getting to know the rest of the couples engaged in this
madness
. Before every on-air conversation with Will and Elise, we get to sit in the green room together, drinking poor-quality instant coffee and trying to pretend we’re not nervous.

Here’s a rundown of our fellow contestants. I’ll largely skip the physical descriptions as there’s only so many adjectives I can use to describe someone who’s overweight without descending into insult (and obligatory self-loathing).

Valerie and George look like they should be running a tea shop somewhere. A successful one, no doubt. Both in their early sixties, they look like the sort of kindly rotund grandparents we all wish we’d had when we were kids. George has the variety of bushy moustache that milk must stick to like a magnet every time he consumes it. Val wears a tiny pair of round spectacles that she hangs around her neck on a silver chain when she’s not using them to peer into her copy of the latest Mills & Boon. You can just tell that these two homely, avuncular folk owe their weight gain to a lot of foodstuffs containing cream. I doubt they’ve ever looked a Big Mac in the eye, but are entirely at home around clotted cream and scones.

Angela and Dominica are a lesbian couple, who look completely bewildered most of the time. It’s as if they were convinced they’d be firmly rejected for the show given their sexual orientation, were dumbfounded to discover that they weren’t, and are actually now part of this madness. I love the pair of them, though. Even in the few brief conversations we’ve had, they seem like friendly, open people. Angela is a bit of an old hippy, quietly spoken and calm of manner, while Dominica is a loud, flamboyant Spaniard, who throws her arms around in an animated fashion even when she’s talking about the most mundane of subjects. Neither wears dungarees, which is rather disappointing, but Angela does favour a headscarf most of the time, which conforms to at least some of the hideously outdated imagery of the average lesbian I carry round in my twentieth-century brain.

Then there is—and I kid you not when I say this—Frankie and Benny. I don’t know whether Stream FM have got some kind of sponsorship campaign running with the well-known restaurant chain, but if they have, these two folk of Jamaican extraction would have to owe their place in the competition to it. I like Frankie; she’s a friendly, happy sort with a big booming voice, and a laugh you can probably hear in Paris. Benny looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than right here, given the tormented expression on his face most of the time. I would be critical of his attitude, but then I can look round and see the exact same expression emanating from Gregory Milton’s face next to me, so I’d better not judge the man too harshly. The cynic in me would think that these two had been included in Fat Chance just to fill out a quota of some kind, but I’m sure Elise wouldn’t have anything to do with that kind of discrimination, so I guess Frankie and Benny are happily here on their own merits (unless I’m right about that sponsorship deal).

The biggest couple out of the six of us are Shane and Theresa. Theresa outweighs me by a good three stone and poor old Shane looks like the Grim Reaper is perched on his shoulder, waiting for him to make a sudden movement and over-exert his vital organs. The man must be over thirty stone. He makes my portly husband look positively anorexic. Shane’s face has that unhealthy pallor of the morbidly obese and you can tell that just living day-to-day life is a struggle for him. Theresa isn’t that far behind, either. I know damn well that she is who I’ll become in the next few years if I don’t do something about my life. I asked her how old she was last week and was distraught when she revealed that she was three years younger than me. The woman looks in her late forties, such is the strain being put on her body by all that extra fat. If anyone needs the impetus to lose weight that this stupid competition provides, it’s these two.

At the bottom of the heap are Lea and Pete. I’ve barely managed to engage them in conversation so far, as when they’re not
outside
chain-smoking cigarettes—having dumped their enormously fat three-year-old offspring named Ashton onto an unsuspecting production assistant—they’re sitting on their iPhones in the corner, ignoring the rest of us. He’s always playing Candy Crush and she’s always leaving Facebook status updates about how wasted they got last weekend, or how wasted they’re going to get
this
weekend. Pete has five teeth from what I can count (I can’t look at his mouth for longer than a few moments without feeling nauseous) and Lea has a hairstyle that suggests some sort of horrific and violent encounter with a malfunctioning blender full of red food colouring. You can tell they’ve been hired for their shock value by Elise and her cronies. You can’t do a reality show without at least a couple of people who look like they’ve barely made it through the early stages of human evolution.

. . . and there you have it. Along with Greg and me, these are your contestants, competitors, guinea pigs, and objects of mild public interest for the next few months. A broad cross-section of modern society, designed to appeal to as much of the listening demographic as is humanly possible. Stream FM is injecting an awful lot of cash into this project, so it’s understandable that they’d want to get as big an audience as they can, but I can’t help thinking that the obvious pigeonholing going on here creates an air of artificiality that—

What the
hell
am I saying? This entire process is
one thousand percent
artificial.

I need to remember that the people who will be benefitting most from this process are not any of us fatties, but the radio station executives who dreamt the whole thing up in the first place. The number of promotional deals the station has struck in the past few weeks with the local gym chain and health food stores is testament to the fact that Fat Chance is all about dragging in the profits for a bunch of rich, well-tailored people who I’ll never meet. Oh sure, I get to use the gym facilities for free and get a decent percentage off all my health food purchases, but that’s about as far as it goes. The real money is most definitely going elsewhere.

If successful, the competition will do no harm to Elise Bailey’s career prospects. Already a rising star of local radio, if Fat Chance is popular, Elise will have the chance to go national—which has been her aim for the past three years. This doesn’t bother me. The girl’s been a good friend for many years, so if my debasement in front of the masses will help her out a bit, I won’t complain an enormous amount.

Having said that, Elise did manage to push my buttons good and proper this morning, by bringing something up on the radio that I would have preferred to stay between us . . .

‘Got a fag?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Got a fag, love?’

Lea and her abnormal haircut are staring at me.

‘No, I don’t smoke, I’m afraid.’

I can almost see her synapses firing behind her eyes as she digests this information. ‘Oh fuck,’ she says and shuffles off. I can’t be entirely sure, but I think she might be wearing slippers under that tracksuit.

Lottie, one of the plethora of production assistants that seem to be strewn randomly all over the Stream FM office, appears at the door to the green room. ‘Okay, gang. We’ll take you through to the studio now.’

‘Here we go again, then,’ Greg mutters next to me.

‘It’ll be fine, ‘ I try to convince him.

‘As long as she doesn’t ask me any questions about what my favourite takeaway food is again.’

‘Yes. The drool on the microphone was a bit unpleasant,’
I t
ease.

We get out of our seats and shuffle reluctantly through the office block with the rest of our fellow contestants. In my job with Regency I’m normally stuck in the back of the complex of buildings that make up the station, so I’d never actually ventured into the production area before Fat Chance started. It’s a hive of young,
desperate-looking
individuals all running around with bits of paper in their hands, trying to look important. I also get the impression that there’s very little real work going on, despite the level of frenetic activity.

Eventually we reach the actual studio, and are led into a sound booth opposite the one Elise and Will host the show from. Needless to say it’s the largest booth in the studio. Shane’s size alone would probably dictate its use, let alone the rest of us.

Lottie shuffles us into place. I notice she always keeps Lea and Pete away from the microphones as much as possible. I gather from Elise that the producers like to keep them away from the live broadcasts, given that the use of the word
cunt
is rather frowned upon during early-morning breakfast shows. My friend is terrified of people swearing on air anyway, so I’m sure she’s more than happy to minimise the chances of letting Lea or Pete turn the air blue.

Lottie leaves us and shuts the soundproof door. This is when I begin to feel the claustrophobia set in. It’s not so much the confined space, as it is the notion that we’re like a herd of wild animals that have been penned up in a cage, awaiting the attention of a crowd of tourists.

‘Woo! It’s bloody hot in here,’ Frankie says, and wafts her hand across her face.

‘Of course it is, woman,’ Benny replies. ‘You get enough sweaty fat people in one place and what do you expect?’

I’m sure somebody once told Benny about the concept of tact when he was young. He just chose to ignore them.

‘Morning, guys!’ I hear Elise’s happy disembodied voice coming at me from all angles. Peering through the glass dividing window, I can see her and Will across the way, prepping for the next section of the show.

We all mumble a half-hearted ‘Good morning’ back to her. There’s something about being crowded into a small room with other people that stops you from being too demonstrative.