‘Holly . . . !’
‘Whoops. Sorry! He can have them all anyway. And, Mummy, I thought you knew that Percy Pig sweets are actually made from pork gelatin, which means they are made from grinding up pigs’ feet and bones, which means they are actually made from dead pigs that may even have been called Percy, which makes them totally one hundred per cent gross. And each one is thirty calories, which means that if you ate ten you’d have to do six hundred sit-ups to burn them off again.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘No one. I read the packet. Anyway, Mummy? You smell a bit funny.’
James raises his eyebrows. ‘You do smell a bit like a brewery, Beetle.’
Bryony smiles. ‘Oh, you know what Granny’s like. I suppose I had one more glass than I should have over lunch. I think I’ll go and have a bath.’
One of the interesting things about getting as fat as Bryony is now, is that you only have to run half a bath because you fill the rest of the tub with your flesh. And Bryony’s flesh means something to her. This roll of fat here: that was Holly. A lot of fat came with Holly. And that one, the next one down: that was Ash. Bryony gained around three stone in the year following her parents’ disappearance, but that parachuted in slowly and silently, billowing onto her in creamy folds at night while she was asleep, so she didn’t notice what was happening at first. Instead of just getting a bit of a tummy, like Clem, she got larger all over, in the way that digital images increase when you pinch them outwards. In the bath, Bryony now feels immense, like a sea creature or a space monster. It is not an entirely unpleasant feeling. It’s actually . . . Bryony drifts off to sleep and only wakes up when the water goes cold. She needs another drink.
But before that: out of the bath. Fluffy towel. Make-up off. Three more Nurofen. Fuck it: four. Now it’s time for moisturiser. Bryony unwraps the £190 jar of Crème de la Mer Moisturizing Gel and rubs some carefully on her face. But what about her neck? Granny has always moisturised her face in what she mysteriously calls ‘the Continental way’, but her neck looks like an elephant’s leg. Bryony applies moisturiser to her neck, perhaps a bit more than you’d really need, but enough to prevent elephant-leg developing, at least overnight. Then she moves on to her décolletage. There was something in some magazine about celebrities with ‘dodgy décolletage’. Surely Crème de la Mer will be good for this area too? And what about her arms? Her breasts? Her stomach? Bryony finishes the pot of moisturiser, which was too expensive anyway, by rubbing some into her knees.
My perfect girlfriend:
1. Long straight black hair, no frizz, worn down, in low ponytail or bunches.
2. Blue eyes – dark, not that insipid watery blue. No weird flecks.
3. No glasses or contact lenses.
4. Good skin. Pale. Not too much foundation. Does not need concealer.
5. Must be under 8 stone. Ideally 7 stone 10.
6. Thighs must not meet at the top.
7. Fat distributed as follows: small amount on face, mainly lips, cheeks. Small tits – roughly a handful (must not be able to hold pencil under them). Tiny stomach is nice. Do not want to see abs. All of rest of fat on bum. Bum firm but wobbles a little when she walks. But not too much.
8. Pink nipples with no hair on them.
9. Natural or no make-up. Mascara is fine.
10. Interesting botanical name.
11. Intelligent but never boring.
12. Must like the Waterboys, World Party, Van Morrison, The The.
13. Square cut short fingernails with v. dark or clear polish.
14. Lip-balm rather than lipstick. Very light pink lipstick is OK (red lipstick on cock is disgusting).
15. Must have watched Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club and other John Hughes films.
16. If she plays lacrosse she will play First Home. If she plays netball she will play Goal Shooter. Will like scoring goals more then running around.
17. Does ballet and/or yoga.
18. Can do the splits.
19. Toenails painted pale pink.
20. Some freckles on nose but nowhere else on body.
21. Wears perfume very subtly. NOT Poison or anything like that. Something unusual and a bit mossy like Givenchy III.
22. Writes long letters in real ink. Blue ink better.
23. Hates grunge music.
24. Hates Bros.
25. Hates The Word.
26. Has a London or neutral accent. NOT from North.
27. Wears floral dresses with bare legs and ballet shoes or plimsolls.
28. Has ripped 501s. But not deliberately ripped with scissors.
29. Likes wearing my sweatshirt.
30. Has been to India at least once.
31. Wants to do science at university. Preferably biology/botany.
32. Is clean and does not smell. No fishy odour.
33. Does not fart.
34. Never burps.
35. Does not eat more than one course at a three course meal.
36. Does not smoke or do drugs. One glass of white wine or champagne OK sometimes.
37. Does not like football, rugby or cricket.
38. Makes friendship bracelets in subtle colours.
39. Does not like dolls, soft toys etc.
40. A pony is OK.
41. Small ears.
42. Must be quite artistic but not in an art school way.
43. Sometimes eats only a small amount of chocolate or fruit for lunch (but not both at once).
44. Understands what it is like to lose mother.
The morning of the day that Piyali inadvertently ruins, no, saves, no, maybe just changes his life begins normally enough. It is a Monday and so he wakes up in Fleur’s cottage with that sick feeling that always comes on a Monday. If the feeling was a word, then the word would be ‘late’. Pi’s homeopath – gasp, breathe, is he seeing her today? Because if he is then he is extremely late, but no, breathe out, it’s OK, he moved his appointment to Thursday because of the thing with the car – tends to work on the level of the word. Each person, she says, has one word that sums up their central theme, or essential dilemma, their whole problem in life. It’s similar to a writing theory that Pi read about where each character has an objective that you can boil down to one word: power, control, safety, success. Knowing this word means you can focus your character, keep them on track, not lose them.
The idea in real life, or at least with his homeopath and certainly at Namaste House, is to get rid of your word, to zap it, delete it, find-and-replace it with love or peace or some other soft frilly thing. And then what? Go through life with a soppy smile on your face chanting and wearing unflattering clothes and making everyone else feel bad? What is actually wrong with normal, honest suffering? Suffering means you are alive, you are real, you are free. Mindfulness – which is what Fleur has gone to teach this morning, leaving Pi alone in the big feather bed that smells of her perfume and her hair – seems intended to turn you into a docile animal that stands in its field all day never complaining and never smashing down fences and . . .
Pi does not write on the level of the word. Some people manage to do that. Their sentences trot along like happy horses until, suddenly, one horseshoe-nail word appears that makes the horse bolt, throw its rider and run away. It’s clever, but anyone with a good dictionary can do it. Pi used to want instead to write on the level of the sentence, like Hemingway and Carver – although didn’t it turn out that Carver’s sentences were created by someone else? His editor, whatshisname? Yes, yes, of course, and Pi was going to look at it with his creative writing students last year and then forgot to order the photocopies in time and . . . When Pi writes now – which is rare, because life gets in the way so bloody much – it is on the level of the scene, like Tolstoy and his mushrooms, which is something else that he should photocopy in fact, but . . . Pi yawns. At least mindfulness stops all this chitter chatter. But he still hates it. Although he did send that student off for yoga classes last week. Which means noth
ing. Yoga is suffering too. It’s fine. It’s just all this other crap that is a problem.
Pi does a headstand to prove he still can. Tweaks his back coming down.
A hot shower. Hotter than Fleur can take it. Does he turn the setting back to where she has it? No. Let her suffer a little too, next time she gets in. Fleur doesn’t have real breakfast food, just a lot of raw birdseed and cold, thin yogurt, so once he is dressed he walks across to the main house and finds Bluebell in the kitchen already making the dal for lunch. Late. Late. LATE! Yesyesyes, but seeing Bluebell is soothing and eating a real hot breakfast means he won’t need lunch and so he is in fact saving time and in any case he doesn’t actually have anything to do today except begin his new novel again and do the shopping so that Kam has the ingredients for supper and Nina has something for her packed lunch, which is what she says now, rather than tiffin, and when he suggested that they visit India together she just said something like ‘Yeah, Dad, whatever’, and then began a long moan about bikinis and bare shoulders and how impossible it is going on holiday to these backward places where you can’t even get a good suntan.
Bluebell makes medu vada, his favourite. Hot, soft, savoury doughnuts made from black dal and spices . . . South Indian, which means they are specially for him. All those recipes she found and learned when he arrived at the house years ago, to try to make him feel at home, which he never did. He suspects that the medu vada are deep fried, which means he shouldn’t have them, but lentils are always healthy, right? She serves them with coconut chutney and a sambar with a tiny bit too much tamarind for Pi’s liking. Then a bowl of fresh fruit with just half a pistachio kulfi, today the front section of a Tardis. Two cups of coffee. There will be nothing on the ridiculous train he has to catch because he has no car. And Fleur can’t even drive, which means she doesn’t even have a car to lend him. Women!
There’s a familiar person at Sandwich Station. At first Pi can’t place him. He is wearing different clothes from usual. This ensemble, complete with jaunty trilby hat, is clearly a London Outfit. But underneath the hat it is definitely James Croft, hen-pecked husband of fat Bryony. Pi goes to the other end of the platform in the hope that James will not see him. It is over two hours going to London this way and who wants to have to talk to someone for two hours? And anyway, Pi has his book, and the LRB, and he doesn’t like the way that his nervous cough comes out when he has to speak to someone new. But, oh dear, here comes James down the platform towards him.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Been visiting?’
No, I’ve just arrived from space. ‘Nice hat,’ says Pi.
‘Oh, thanks,’ says James. And then he rabbits on and on about his hat so that they are still talking when they board the train, which means it is natural for them to sit together, and it turns out that James is actually a very serious and warm person – a writer too, in fact, which Pi had almost forgotten – and on his way to meet his editor, on whom he admits to having a slight crush, harmless of course. And then that deep sigh. He asks Pi about women. How does one cope with women?
‘At least you only have one to cope with,’ says Pi.
And then, for reasons he later can’t understand at all, he tells James everything.
The gym is full of old people. They all sit there watching MTV Dance, which has so far only shown music videos with extreme close-ups of women’s arses in Lycra, denim or plain cotton, wiggling, twerking, on a motorbike, a bed, a zebra, or some combination of these. It’s not entirely unappealing, although who knows what the old people think. One man has brought a hardback library book, which he reads with a towel over his head, but everyone else just looks at the screen nearest to them because, well, because the screens are there, and what they show is quite arresting. For example Lady Gaga, at this moment wearing only a pair of white knickers and a bra, singing about being born this way, looking as if she could die of malnutrition any minute, but actually making Bryony wonder why she wasn’t born that way, which is probably what you’re supposed to think. And presumably you are also supposed to wonder what would happen if you went out wearing only a pair of white knickers and your period started or some yellow discharge came out or you realised you’d forgotten to wax your bikini line or you had waxed your bikini line but an ingrown hair had become infected or you just peed yourself a little bit . . .
‘Hasn’t got a pretty face, though, has she?’ says one of the old women to the old man on the next exercise bike.
This is Bryony’s third session at the gym. During the first two she learned never to attempt any of the following ever again: the rowing machine, on which she managed a bare thirty-two seconds, despite her exercise plan suggesting ten minutes; the treadmill, on which she reached a maximum speed of 6kph before asking the fitness instructor if there was any way of making it go downhill, which did not make him laugh at all; anything in the weight room, full of young men with tattooed necks and almost certainly shrivelled dicks who did not look at Bryony even once. Not even once! And she is prettier than Lady Gaga, objectively, sort of, despite weighing approximately four times as much. According to the magazines that they keep on the filing cabinet in the corner, which are too lowbrow for Bryony to ever actually buy, but are one of the few pleasures of coming to the gym, even Kate Moss is now fat. What hope is there for anyone else in that case? Surely that is the point where the editors of these magazines would decide to slash their wrists or drink a bottle of bleach because, well, if the most beautiful woman in the world cannot live up to the standards of even the thinnest, cheapest, crappest magazine, then . . .
But the true-life stories are quite funny. And they often feature people fatter than Bryony, for example the woman whose husband lost half his head – his actual head – in a blender. And the man who grew a nose on his forehead. And the fourteen-year-old who has already had liposuction, a tummy tuck and a gastric band. The only people who are thin in these magazines accompany stories like ‘I lost both my arms to heroin’, or ‘I gorge on crisps and chocolate but only weigh four stone’. Everyone else is fat, even the woman who didn’t let disability stop her from selling her body. Actually, another semi-pleasure of the gym is that several people who go to it are also fatter than Bryony. There’s one now, being helped onto the treadmill. Bryony wonders when he last saw his dick. At least her fat doesn’t stop her having sex. She simply gets on all fours. Or she could if she wanted to. But what if you were a man and you were so fat that your penis actually disappeared?
When MTV Dance is not showing Lady Gaga or Rihanna videos it shows endless ads for companies called things like Wonga and QuickQuid – really – that will give you £200 until payday and charge you £50 interest, which is 326% APR; or you can get a loan of £1,200 over ten months at a cost of only £1,631.34, which means you have to pay back £2,831.34, which is an APR of 1,362%. Bryony thinks of how happy Granny is whenever she makes ten per cent on something. Or when vendors realise that the value of their house has gone up by fifteen per cent. These places must be raking it in. Except that the saps who would go for such a bad deal are presumably so poor that they can never pay it back. Imagine being that poor. And really fat. And losing half your head in a blender.
Bryony is on one of those bikes with big seats that recline, so you can read a magazine and feel almost like you’re relaxing, except for the fact that your legs are going round and round. But there’s so much to watch in the gym. Lady Gaga, dickless men, the cartoon old people who go to Wonga, as if any old person would ever borrow anything apart from maybe a cup of sugar, and of course all the ridiculous ‘challenges’ that the fitness instructors pin up on the noticeboards to encourage all the hopeless, morbidly obese losers who come here. At the moment they have a challenge to see how many Easter eggs you can burn off before Easter. A Cadbury’s Creme Egg apparently has 180 calories. A Flake Easter egg has 810 calories. A large Dairy Milk Easter Egg has 1,800 calories. Some twat has made little stickers in the shape of these different-size eggs that you can add to your chart to show how much
exercise you have done. You’d think you could then go and eat what you’ve burned off, but no: the chart informs you that instead of, say, two Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, which would be really quite a modest amount of Creme Eggs to eat in one go, let alone in one day, you should really eat a small steak and some broccoli. Right. Bryony has been on this exercise bike now for fifteen minutes and has burned only eighty calories. This whole exercise thing does not add up. It must be wrong. Bryony really needs a drink.
Monday morning in the Alpine House, where miserably tiny plants cling to barren-looking rocks in an artificially cold and dry climate. It is everyone’s least favourite glasshouse, although schoolchildren are always taken there first, perhaps as some sort of punishment. When will people learn that the only things kids want to see at Kew are the pitcher plants and anything else that is even slightly carnivorous or looks like a dick? A surprising amount of plants look like dicks. More, of course, look like vaginas, but kids aren’t quite as used to seeing the insides of vaginas as they are to seeing dicks. Or maybe they are now, what with the internet, and . . .
‘So?’ says Izzy.
‘This is stupid.’
‘What?’
‘I feel like I’m reporting to you.’
‘Well, she won’t tell me what happened. She just keeps going on about how amazing you are.’ Izzy raises an eyebrow. ‘And how gorgeous your body is . . .’
‘Why does it matter what happened?’
‘I need to keep an eye on you. Lest you transgress. Again.’
The only remotely interesting thing that ever happened in the Alpine House was when a crime novelist came for a whole week to observe the plants and atmosphere so that she could set a murder there. The easiest way to murder someone in the Alpine House is simply to make them stay there for quite a long time until they die of cold or boredom. It was amazing that the crime novelist herself survived. Or maybe she didn’t. Charlie can’t actually remember what happened next, or if the novel ever even came out. Maybe she’s still in here somewhere.