REBECCA O’ROURKE

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He’s desperate to be out there so he can be just a body. Just another body, but it doesn’t always work.

Daryll spent years of his life being almost ill. Dot, his mother, couldn’t cope with his size, she needed him to have a gland problem, a blood problem, a gut problem, even a psychological problem, even, for god’s sake, an unhealthy attachment to his mother. Daryll had to be ill because otherwise he was just the freak product of her womb and Dot wasn’t having that. Her one big mistake. Had she really dropped her pants for a slob like - well, like her son?

When he was sixteen she threw him out. Not literally, he was far too big for that. Twenty-three stone and sixty quid a week to feed. She left home. Without telling him. Nothing in his miserable childhood prepared him for her unkindness. The police were respectful enough, until he turned away and then they laughed behind their hands.

Scarletta is altogether different. Her parents couldn’t believe their luck when this bundle of baby fat with thick black curls and rosebud lips tumbled into their lap. Literally. Somewhere high in the sky, where the tower blocks touch lips with the clouds and people dream of better lives than the ones they live, a woman reached the end of her tether.

Not only did she live in this zoo, not only had she married him in the first place but she’d got pregnant and after all the pain and shit and blood what had she got to show for it? A fat baby. A monster. Baby was crying. Baby was hungry, again. Mummy had had it. Slip the not so safety catch in the bathroom and oops. Baby gone with the bath water.

Ella, helping Jack to lever a discarded fridge onto the back of his lorry, paused to stretch and saw something falling. Shouting a warning to Jack, she was bowled over by Scarletta’s arrival. Like Simeon and Elizabeth they were gnarled and there had been no children to bless their union, although union a plenty, when suddenly a baby so beautiful, so succulent, they could only make desultory attempts to find her parents before spiriting her back to their prefab in Enfield. Under their loving care she thrived, cooing and gurgling like the best of babies, growing sleek as a seal and cumber- some as you please.

Ella and Jack loved Scarletta. They oiled her skin and combed her hair. Ella sewed the parachutes Jack scavenged up in Hendon into the finest, flowing dresses: she stitched her own print dirndl skirts into knickers for

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her. Later, when she was rich and had all her clothes made in the West End, Scarletta insisted they used Ella’s gargantuan paper patterns, thriftily made out of discarded advertising posters.

Their love gave Scarletta a confidence and beauty that never left her. Today she strides amongst the desperately festive shoppers homing in

on Oxford Street. They barely notice her, except for the odd terrified child convinced that the buses are running on the pavements. She launches herself at their indifference, chuckles at them, so lost in their skins, barely flesh on their bones. They look so cold, and she is so hot. As she passes she breathes over them and watches, amused, as the slush melts and the frost- ing on their faces melts into drops of warm rain. They think perhaps they are hallucinating, as a breeze from the Mediterranean washes over them, warm and spicy with lemons chasing oranges. She is her own sun, and radiates for her own pleasure.

Until she sees him. Then she wants him, wants to warm him up, uncoil him. He looks so ashamed of his skin. So afraid, failing to merge in with the vast, seething, crowd of stick people. The jerk of muscled thighs, the swing of taut hips suddenly disgusts her. This keeps happening. There is nothing to be done, except remind herself they are only people, that beneath those cages of bone beat hearts as full and red as her own. She smiles at one of them, letting the pity ooze. Put on some weight she croons before launching herself recklessly across Regent Street. Traffic stops for her. He is almost out of sight as she pants after him.

He sees her reflection in Liberty’s casement windows and panics. He knows who she’s making for. Anger and embarrassment boil in him. Who does she think she is? Can she imagine he wants her? A woman that blowsy and brash. She is grotesque, hugely fat. Her blubber coils itself round and around her and it lurches in an awful slow motion tremble as she gains on him. The women Daryll wants are stick thin, long legged, blonde and insouciant. They never want him, of course. That is part of their charm. London is alive with women happy to show him their contempt.

Scarletta knows all this without being told. She is going to do something about it. It is what she does best. The shoppers part to let them pass, disgusted by her, such flagrant, pursuant lust.

She catches up with him, between the fruit stall and the buskers, and halts him with a look. Head bowed, he walks back towards her until they are close enough to touch. He meets her eyes. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ she says, and - he believes her.

Underneath his clothes, the sweat dries into cold, lardy smears. The

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smell of it sickens him, the weight of his flesh drags him down and makes him stumble. She holds out her hand and smiles. All around them, the city flickers as light from a thousand places gathers on faces hollow as the darkness bumping past them, Scarletta hooks her arm into his and leads him on.

The crowds are too embarrassed to watch for long as she wedges him into a doorway. Taking both his hands in hers she smiles an indigo smile that makes him believe her when she says it will be alright. Each flicker of the pain, the shame, the guilt, the loathing of flesh, spins into something else. Now her thighs are oaks trees, lying on either side of parkland, lush and green. Her nipples are fingers, dipping in to bowls of raspberries, her lips are the colour of sun in a bloody eclipse. As her bra falls away, it curls to the ground, big enough to cradle a child.

The hairs on the back of his neck rise as he’s curved around her breast, to suck and knead her. She moves herself under and over him, taking him further and further into her skin, shuddering, breathing, shuddering as the whole building rocks into an orgasm that rattles the glass in the windows and cracks the arch above their heads. There is plaster dust in her hair. Gently he picks it out. Standing there, fat fisty hand in hand, their coats are still buttoned up. They have not even kissed. He says ’How . . .?’ She says, ’Later.’

‘Tell me the worst thing, the very worst thing that’s ever happened

And listens with her hands, circling them backwards and forwards, feeling her way in under every piece of skin and flesh and flab there is. He starts to tell her, but as soon as the words meet air, they melt and he can’t get them back. They drink a little, talk a little, touch a little. He gets greedier, now, wanting to dive down into her, tryrng to make her call out to him. She knows it doesn’t have to be like this, slows him right down and moves in after him until he’s the one trying to pull away.

Now she insists, parting the rolls and bundles of flesh until she finds it, soft and small as a snail, curled in against him. It bothers him. Usually they don’t get that close. Usually they don’t need to know, He stumbles away from her, shame blushing his back red. Tears to be ashamed of too.

But he has to turn towards her and then he can’t help falling. She is getting closer and closer to his sex, it uncurls and limbers after her. He starts to unravel and she catches him up and holds him hard against her, she’s panting now, bracing her tongue against her teeth. All her flesh is on

And later there is a room where she says,

to you.’

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the move and his joins the dance and it goes on and on and on, her sex opening and closing on him.

’Size isn’t everything.’ Finally, she says,