great white

Mother called me ‘a fat fuck’. I was two years old. People say you don’t remember that far back. I’ve a tendency to agree. I don’t go in for all that floating about in my mother’s sad sack, swimming out of her vagina, being held upside down, placed on scales and weighed, before being swaddled, with a baby Churchill face poking out of the blankets and trying to make sense of a world by feebly clawing at it and thinking what the fuck. I remember none of that. I do, however, remember what my mother said. It was nothing personal. She did make me dinner every day. It would be some gucky mix, which she hated, because it reminded her of food and held at arm’s length. She preferred meals as dry as tree bark. Low GI. Sachets of something; nothing added for an extra free filling. Cabbage soup was a favourite. The smell carried upstairs to my box bedroom and made our house smell like the inside of an anorak hood in the rain. Fat was failure. Getting pregnant was a failure. I was a fat failure.

Mother talked more to the bathroom scales than to me. She screamed, hugged, held them tight and accused them of all kinds of infidelities, but she always went back to them. There was always a new diet, new kinds of shoes, more cabbage soup, a clean break and a new start. School was a shock to me. There were other kind of mothers and they were nothing like mine. Their hair wasn’t coiffured. Their nails weren’t red shellac ready to snatch at you. They smiled, wore no makeup apart from the odd dash of pink lipstick and seemed as ready to laugh as to cry. They stood shrilling at each other around the school gates and avoiding Mother’s eyes. We stood together beside the creaking of the lamppost in the wind, beamed down like two aliens off a spaceship, not the number 46 Double Decker. I looked at her and she looked at me and I understood that this was what it meant to be frumpy and fat and a failure. They were jealous of her because she was thin and young and lovely.

‘Get.’ Mother pushed me in the back of the head towards the gates. One of the other mothers, a furless ape face and frame, wearing a green Mackintosh, peered through her thick spectacles and tutted. The other mothers turned towards us, but they no longer seemed to notice me. Mother let her cigarette drop and stilettoed it to death with her heels. The school bell was ringing when she called me back. I looked up at her, flush as a unwrapped package in my new school uniform. ‘Joseph,’ she crouched beside me, her eau- du- something perfume engulfing us, her pencil thin skirt riding up to breaking point so that her knees buckled and she had to clutch onto my shoulder to stop from stumbling. I’d something of the same colour of eyes are hers, that wandered away from the path of true blue, too blue, but not enough green, a crazy paving of a colour, that always caught men’s eyes and fixed them on hers. I wasn’t any different. She whispered in my ear. ‘You know the way home.’ It wasn’t a question. She pushed me away from her. The second bell rang again, and I was scrambling away from her, that day and every day afterwards, towards the school gates and all my potential fat new friends.

Miss Lonigan was a fat fuck too. She had a couple of chins that could have been mouths and her hair was the grey-blue of Brillo pads. She smiled lots and laughed lots, which made me flinch and step away from her in case she grabbed me and interrogated me about what I was doing and what I was thinking I was doing, but it wasn’t a trick. She was nice and gradually my face unfurled and I learned to smile back. Miss Lonigan said I’d a nice smile. It made me smile even more, even though I knew she said the same thing to the other 23 boys and 22 girls. Miss Lonigan was smart that way.

She was dumb in other ways. She’d asked me about free school meals and about whether my dad worked. She’d the form in front of her on the desk. It was play-time and the rest of the class were in the playground, skipping, bouncing balls and shrieking for no reason other than they weren’t stuck inside like me. I stood beside her desk looking out the window, the cries of the other kids plucking my body like a string, pulling me towards the door. I tried to explain.
‘I’ve got two dads.’

She chuckled at that, her whole body jelly-fishing about behind the desk. ‘Which one stays with you and your mum?’

‘None.’ My toe scraped the wooden floor, scattering chalk dust

‘That’s impossible.’ Her hand darted towards the frame of her spectacles and she looked at me as if I’d gotten a simple arithmetic problem the wrong way round. She delved into the drawer on her right, where the leather tawse was kept and where her stash of sweets were kept. She popped one in her mouth and handed me one.

I was in no hurry now. I’d fallen in love with chocolate on my second day at school. I’d popped it in my mouth because the other kids were watching. Mother had warned me about chocolate and smoking. There was no need to tell which was worse. She smoked, but even the mention of chocolate made her hysterical and hug the kitchen scales. It was the first secret I’d been able to keep from her. I figured if smoking was as good as chocolate I’d soon have another. I didn’t tell Miss Lonigan that. Neither did I tell her that were men were concerned the impossible was routine for Mother.

‘What does your father work as? Fathers, ‘she corrected herself and reached for another chocolate.

I smiled back, shrugged, my mouth watering. Fuck knows, I was going to say, but I’d already had the belt for bad language and didn’t want to upset her. ‘I think one’s an astronaut.’

Her chins bounced up and down as she held in a smile, handed me another chocolate, and waved me away outside to play with the other children.

‘Don’t worry,’ she shouted after me, ‘I’ll make sure you get a free school meal from now on. You’re not getting enough to eat. But it’s not your fault’ The last part came tumbling out, bundled together, with the classroom door swinging shut and gagging her.

I was chewing chocolate. Mother said I ate too much and school meals made you fat. I didn’t want to be fat, but I did want chocolate. I’d need to be sneaky and keeping stumm