Some Rain Must Fall (6 page)

By the 25th of June the two women were becoming remarkable.

Miss Thinne was as thin as she had been at the beginning of puberty. Her thighs and calves had lost all superfluous fat; her clavicles and shoulderblades were becoming prominent, her fingers taper-like. Her bra became wrinkled with unoccu
pied space; her clothes hung loose and slid about on her as she moved. Her neck seemed to have grown; cheekbones appeared where none, even with the aid of cosmetics, had ever been before.

‘You know, Eleanor,’ suggested her colleagues. ‘You may be taking this diet too far. ’

‘Think of your health, dear. We wouldn’t want you to disappear into thin air. ’

‘You look great just as you are now, honestly.’

‘But it’s not that I’m dieting,’ protested Miss Thinne mildly. ‘I just don’t want to eat anything.’

In that case, it was agreed, she should see a doctor.

But Miss Thinne knew that her metamorphosis was meant to be.

Miss Fatt knew it too, and took no action, apart from exercise and (lately) a girdle.

‘D’you think Mel Gibson likes ’em
that
big?’ joked Mr Carp, only trying to be nice. He thought that she was perhaps overeating out of nerves at the prospect of the imminent movie role. As for her television assignment playing the girlfriend (or possibly wife) of the criminal, that had come and gone, and Miss Fatt had received high praise for her performance. The director had been delighted, actually, that she was so much more curvaceous than she’d been at the audition. ‘Good slattern potential,’ he’d pronounced, and ordered a teddy for her, presumably from that shelf in the wardrobe department marked
VOLUPTUOUS SLATTERN
. But he’d said it in the nicest possible way, as a professional director to a professional actress.

Of course, this was a couple of weeks ago now, and she had gained more weight since then. A punishing regime of jogging and press-ups waged a losing battle against the six square meals a day with which she was covering her former shape with soft new flesh.

‘My God you eat a lot,’ said her actor friend one day. His perfect failure to understand excited a small flame of contempt in her, and she looked at him condescendingly, as if to say, But of
course
I do – what else would you expect?

On the 25th of July Miss Thinne began her day by bringing a tray of food in to Miss Fatt. She herself took small bites of a Chinese lettuce as Miss Fatt devoured pancakes with jam, fried eggs and bacon, Welsh rarebit and a bowl of custard. Miss Fatt was eating perhaps even more now that she was miserable, for she had lost her chance to play the sexy, sinister villainess in
Lethal Weapon VI
. A week away from shooting, the casting director had caught sight of her new shape and immediately cancelled her contract, employing in her place another slender young woman with long legs, big breasts and a face like Marilyn Monroe’s.

Friends advised her to sue, but in their heart of hearts they thought she had only a dubious moral right to win.

‘Are you all right?’ they asked her, meaningfully.

Since then, Miss Fatt had been playing sexy overweight women in commercials. The directors were just as pleasant as ever, but Carp and Bravitt tried to point out to her, in a subtle way, that she couldn’t reasonably expect their firm to secure as many assignments for her as before.

‘The use for big women in advertisements is limited, Suzie. You’ve either got to lose some weight, or do some serious thinking.’

‘Serious thinking?’

‘You could give up being sexy altogether. I could put you down in the books as a “housewife and mother” type. You know the kind of thing: sensible perm, cheap floral dress, spreading margarine on the kids’ sandwiches with a golden
sunny halo all around you … Chucking dirty clothes into a washing machine to a choreographed dance routine … Can you still dance, love?’

‘No,’ sighed Miss Fatt ‘Not really.’

‘Well,’ said Carp, a shadow of distaste crossing his face. ‘Think it over anyway. But, you know, the best thing to do would be to lose weight.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ promised Miss Fatt, but she knew that eating less was out of the question, and it was getting more difficult to exercise, what with the bulging belly and the expanding bosom. Her actor friend had broken off with her just at the point where she was seriously considering going to bed with him; the reason he gave was that he couldn’t afford to refill his refrigerator several times a week. This was the first unkind word uttered to Miss Fatt since the change in her condition had begun.

The first unkind word uttered to Miss Thinne came soon after, when one of the elderly ladies whose malnutrition she was trying to correct pushed a plate of food away and jeered, ‘Who are
you
to say I don’t eat enough?’

‘I … I’m sorry,’ grimaced Miss Thinne.

The 25th of August Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne spent at home, for it was a Sunday.

Ordinarily, Miss Thinne would have gone out to play the oboe with the Catholic Women’s Sinfonia, but she’d had to resign from the group because she no longer had the lung-power to inspirate the instrument.

Miss Fatt would probably still have been working on
Lethal
Weapon VI
, if she hadn’t been disqualified. Mind you, by now she was no longer even what her actor ex-friend had described as ‘a bit gross’. She was
rather
gross. Her cheeks
were filling out and merging with the new fullness of her neck and chin; on the rest of her body a number of bones had disappeared, in the sense that they could be found only by determined palpation. A long crease trapped sweat and talcum powder under her belly, and her breasts sagged under their own weight. Her usual attire was no longer a Wonderbra and fashionable gear; it was floral dresses and a sarong which Miss Thinne had given her for her birthday some weeks before. All the clothes that no longer fitted her they’d already given away to charity shops, thus revealing their unspoken shared assumption that she would never be a size 12 – or even 16, for that matter – again. Giving away the twenty-one pairs of unwearable shoes was, well, almost unbearable, but what hurt most was having to put away all her rings (no, she would
not
sell them – not yet) for fear that they would strangle her fingers.

As far as her work went, she played only fat women now, usually in humorous contexts. She had sworn off drama since she had landed the role, in a TV movie, of the fat older sister of a beautiful young girl. The part had required of her a Poisonous Jealousy which took advantage of the younger sister’s low self-esteem to make the girl feel unattractive, unloved and ungrateful. It had seemed a good enough role, but the director’s method in coaching Miss Fatt had consisted of exhortations like:

‘Come on, Suzie. Remember you’re fat and revolting. You want
her
to feel as repulsive as
you
are – it makes you feel better. See the psychology?’

Miss Fatt was determined to stick to roles in commercials in which she could smile in floral dresses and be invited afterwards to have a cup of tea with the other extras.

She might have considered giving up work altogether, as the amount of exercise she had to do in order to maintain her fitness for it was torture, but, more than ever, the two
women needed the income from their jobs. Not only did their grocery bill continue to increase almost daily; but they’d had to buy a whole set of larger furniture for Miss Fatt to sit in, and a number of giant soft cushions for Miss Thinne, to protect her protruding bones from bruising.

One day Miss Fatt came home to find Miss Thinne still lying in bed, too weak to get up.

Shrouded by the sheet, her body looked like a skeleton, but once uncovered by Miss Fatt it didn’t look too bad: no thinner, surely, than that of a healthy seventy-year-old. As for Miss Thinne’s weakness, she’d merely left the bowl of celery slivers too far out of reach. A nibble or two and she was on her corrugated feet again, ready and able to prepare Miss Fatt’s mid-afternoon roast.

On the 25th of September Miss Fatt visited Miss Thinne in hospital.

She came by public transport, having some time ago sold the car, partly to raise money for food, and partly because she’d been having trouble squeezing herself into the driver’s seat.

‘Hello, Eleanor,’ she said at the foot of the hospital bed where Miss Thinne lay naked, her bedclothes thrown aside because of their weight on the starved white limbs. ‘How’s the leg?’

Miss Thinne had fractured her tibia in a fall, easily. The plaster cast resembled one of those white thigh-length boots Miss Fatt had once sported in an ice-cream commercial.

‘Home in a week or two.’

Looking up at her visitor, Miss Thinne didn’t by any means feel herself to be the more unfortunate of the two. Tears
came to her eyes as she observed how ugly Miss Fatt was becoming. Her eyes were piggy, her mouth a puffy rosebud marooned in an expanse of mottled pink. The dowdy lace and wire of a huge bra from a charity shop peeped out above the folds of her birthday sarong which, unbelievably, was now too small. She seemed condemned to exude a morbid sexual grossness while Miss Thinne, naked as she was, seemed utterly sexless. Even so, the nursing staff found it in their hearts to say about her:

‘Isn’t she creepy?’

And about Miss Fatt:

‘What a slug. ’

By October 25th Miss Fatt was no longer playing fat ladies in commercials.

She had, in fact, been removed from the books of Carp & Bravitt. Striving for a tact so impossible to achieve that he soon abandoned the struggle, Bravitt told her, at first, that it wasn’t worth her while to be kept on the books, given how rarely the firm would be able to find work for her. Then, when Miss Fatt made the mistake of pleading with him, he told her she was not the sort of person, physically speaking, that Carp & Bravitt wanted themselves associated with.

Thus ushered into the ranks of the jobless, Miss Fatt waddled to the employment office, which was located (luckily) only a few doors along from Carp & Bravitt’s office building, so that she didn’t have far to travel in order to get the news that she was no good to anyone.

Riding home on the bus, the stamp
UNEMPLOYABLE
burning on her forehead, she was far too hungry to feel as awful as she should.

Limping with a stick and still in plaster, Miss Thinne was allowed to go home on the understanding that she would rest up, subsisting on sick pay.

Unfortunately, this was out of the question. She just couldn’t do without her overtime and penalty rates – if anything, she needed a raise to fund Miss Fatt’s ever-growing appetite. So, impressively sprightly in her slimline plaster cast, she returned to work, shocking her old colleagues.

‘Lovely to have you back, Eleanor,’ they winced.

The Eleanor they had back was a startling bird of prey, with teeth advancing as the flesh of the face retreated, ears like curls of pink wire, and pop-eyes.

Soon enough reports were brought back of Eleanor’s inability to nurse owing to her frailty and, more damningly, to her appearance frightening the people she was supposed to be caring for. With the utmost sensitivity and goodwill she was therefore relieved of her duties.

By November, Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne were practically fugitives (if such a word can be applied to people who rarely move) from the ant-eater snout of hospitalisation. They lived in fear of some officious social worker calling on them and ‘assessing’ them as unfit to stay at home.

Their metamorphosis having advanced swiftly, they were now utterly dependent on one another for simple survival. Miss Thinne had to be fed when she was asleep, or she would retch convulsively at the prospect of eating. Lukewarm vegetable soup poured carefully into her mouth in the middle of the night smuggled enough nutrients into her body to keep her alive, though she would wake up coughing and spluttering, glaring at her ministering companion in fear and outrage before coming to her senses.

Lately, she had the bewildering sensation that there were only a few thousand proteins, vitamins, minerals and whatever else floating about in her body, and that she could actually feel these being consumed and extinguished one by one.

In the daytime she would go out to the corner grocer to buy food. Unemployment benefits were hardly enough to cover this expense, but extra money had been raised through selling off everything except the bed, the cushions and the cooking equipment. Even so, they had to be disciplined in their budget: only powdered soup, potatoes, rice and oats were worth buying these days, as anything else was eaten too quickly, and with too little effect, to justify the increasingly frail Miss Thinne carrying it home.

Finally, on the 25th, Miss Thinne collapsed at the shop, fracturing two of her ribs on the grocer’s burly arms as he leapt forward to catch her. Desperately though she tried to leave for home, she lost consciousness in the attempt and was, instead, promptly removed to a hospital.

Mere hours later, Miss Fatt’s helpless bellowing for food provoked neighbours to call the police, so that she, too, ended up being taken to a hospital, albeit a different one.

In Miss Thinne’s hospital, staff of various ranks said:

‘Don’t you worry, dear: you’ll be right as rain in no time.’ Or:

‘Well then, Eleanor, you haven’t been taking very good care of yourself, have you?’

After a day or two, no longer
to
her but in her earshot, they said other things too, like:

‘Progressive lipodystrophy.’

‘Hypophyseal cachexia.’

‘I think the little bitch must be
taking
something to flush
the IV fluids through her system without absorbing them. Search her bedside locker.’

In Miss Fatt’s hospital, Miss Fatt was not addressed directly even in the beginning, because her problem was diagnosed as being mental in origin rather than physical. The fact that no one tried to communicate with her didn’t matter much anyway, since she might not have been able to listen: her ears were swelling up into little puddings. She certainly couldn’t hear the farrago of diagnoses and recommendations her doctors were thinking up for her in faraway parts of the building.