Fat

by Rob Grant

Genres: Fantasy; Humor & Satire; Science Fiction; Humorous sci-fi

Synopsis

Rob Grant''s new novel is a revelation. After INCOMPETENCE we would all have expected a killingly funny satire. And in its satire of our obsession with body image, of how the media makes us what we are FAT is certainly that. But in its depiction of Grenville, a fat man at his wits end with the need to be thin; of Hayleigh, a teenage girl obsessed with her terror of being fat and of Jeremy, the self-absorbed, self-adoring ''conceptualist'' employed to promote the government''s new ''Fat Farms'' Rob Grant has given us, yes a very, very funny book, but also an immensely moving and personal novel about how we all feel about our bodies. As Grenville deals with the humilation and daily indignity of being fat, as Hayleigh struggles to deal with her anorexia and as Jeremy comes to terms with the dangerous lies at the centre of the government''s new health regime FAT takes us on a hilarious and thought-provoking journey through our all-consuming obession with fat. This is a hilariously moving, movingly hilarious novel and marks a massive step-change in Rob Grant''s growth as a writer. Here is a hugely commerical new voice in mainstream, high concept, high in poly-saturates, commercial fiction. It''s also safe to say that with this new novel, he''s writing about what he knows ...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

It’s unclear precisely when it became illegal to be fat.


Of course, technically it’s not, even in this day and age. Even with the blatant persecution of all tubbies, there’s no official
legislation on any statute book that comes right out and says fatness is against the law.


But it is.

It started slow, as these things do. It just gradually became increasingly uncomfortable to be overweight. Just inch by blubbery
inch, less and less acceptable. It probably truly reached a critical mass with the airlines. They began charging by body weight.
And how could you argue? It costs more money to lift a fat person off the runway than a thin one, no question. Fuel-to-weight
ratio. Simple arithmetic. Oil crises. Fuel prices through the stratosphere. Somebody had to pay. Why not the fat?


Of course, there were protests. But nobody took them seriously. Fat people are fat because they’re lazy, weak-willed or stupid,
or all of the above. They could stop being fat if they really wanted to. Who’s going to listen to that kind of pressure group?
Let them eat lard.


So there it was: your airline ticket was priced according to your body mass index, and that was that.

But it was never going to stop there, now, was it?

Because now it was tangible. The slow and swirling loathing that had long been churning in the undercurrents and eddies of
public prejudice had been given form. Fat people were subnormal. Fat people were less than acceptable. Fat people were second
class.


And so they started paying extra on all transport. On Tube trains. On buses. An extra little fuel duty when they filled their cars, because, hey – fuel is precious, and they use more
of it than the rest of us to get their cellulite-pocked backsides from A to B.


And then some Health Authorities who were facing swingeing budget cuts had to make some harsh decisions. And they decided
they would not carry out certain operations on the obese, such as hip and knee replacements. If fat people wanted to punish
their joints by forcing them to bear excessive loads, why should the rest of us pay for the repair work? And why should they
take up valuable operating room time with heart bypasses when they were only going to clog up their new arteries with all
kinds of saturated fats anyway?


And because one Authority got away with it, it spread. It spread to the whole of the National Health Service. If you’re fat,
and sick, don’t even think of calling an ambulance. Don’t waste your time sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. Here’s the prescription,
you dummy: Lose Weight.


And you couldn’t call it persecution, in truth. Not even when fat suits became commonplace props for comedians. Not even after
the odd street-kicking, or the wave of fat attacks videoed on mobile phones. Not even when the Government brought in the fat
tax, nor when they set up the euphemistically named ‘Well Farms’, optional at first, but soon, of course, not so optional.


Because all of this, all of it, really, was for the fat person’s own good. The ridicule, the humiliation: it just might help
fat people to buck their ideas up and become more desirable people. Which is to say: thin people.


It was in their own best interests.

Well, here’s a little tip. When somebody does something you don’t like, and then tells you they did it in your own best interest:
run. Run, my friend, till you drop. And don’t look back.


Grenville Roberts got out of bed. That was no mean achievement, by any means. The effort left him breathless and slightly
dizzy, and he had to sit down again for fear he’d faint. Then he’d have to lift himself up off the floor, which would be a
substantially more gruelling enterprise, even assuming he sustained no major damage from the fall.


Of course, now he was sitting on his bed once more, and sooner or later he’d have to stand up again. What if that left him
equally breathless and dizzy? Would he be condemned forever to stand up and sit down on his bed, like a victim of some mythological
Greek torture? That would be a fine thing, to spend eternity helpless as a gigantic jack-in-the-box. He supposed it was only
a matter of time before things would get that bad. Before he could no longer leave his bedroom without the aid of an elephant-rescue
winch and the coordinated efforts of the Air-Sea Rescue Team.


But his dizziness passed, his breathing eased and he stood, this time successfully, and made his way to the bathroom.

He performed his ablutions efficiently and without relish. He took a shower, of course. He couldn’t remember the last time
he’d taken a bath. He did, however, remember that he’d barely got out of it alive.


He dried himself, again, no meagre challenge. There was a lot of him to dry, and vast expanses of it were harder to reach
than the hidden jungles of Papua New Guinea. For all he knew there were nomad tribes concealed in inaccessible creases in
his back.


Now came the really hard part: getting dressed.

He selected his clothes. Not too difficult. He had very few that still fit him. And today the choice was dictated for him anyway.


He paused at the dresser drawers where he was sifting through the vast expanses of black cotton that constituted his underpants
these days, and caught his reflection in the mirror. It always shocked him to see his face, even though he’d seen it not fifteen
minutes earlier, when he’d shaved. It was nothing like the image of himself he still carried around in his head.


How had this happened to him? How did he get here? It wasn’t as if he’d entered cow-pie-eating competitions on a daily basis.
It wasn’t as if he chewed through his own weight in beef dripping every morning, or sat down to lavish banquets every dinner
time, the table creaking and groaning under the weight of suckling pigs and roasted swans.


Some are born fat. Some achieve fatness.

Others have fatness thrust upon ’em.

And so it had been for Grenville.

He wasn’t born fat. He had been, for most of his life, actually quite slender. In fact, when he’d suddenly noticed he’d acquired
a slight belly in his late twenties, he’d been quite shocked. Horrified, even. He’d assumed it was a consequence of his happy
love affair with beer, a beautiful relationship he’d regretfully abandoned. It had become clear he could no longer indulge
himself with whatever comestibles took his fancy and remain trim. Furthermore, it seemed inevitable he would have to start
consciously taking, God help him, some kind of exercise.


Exercise.

Dear oh dear.

But he did it. He sucked it up, and he did it. He endured the mindless boredom of lifting up weights and putting them down
again in expensive gymnasia for a while. He tolerated the moronic repetitiveness of Healthclubland, with its vile liniment
smells mingled with brutally over-applied aftershaves, and the casual fashion display of depressing male genitalia in the changing rooms, and the eye-gouging chlorine in the swimming pool, and the six-hour wait for a cup of coffee
in the cafeteria. He put up with it all until the very prospect of dropping a coin into the slot of a gym locker filled him
with such dread, he could no longer face it.


But by then, the rebellious belly had been pounded into submission.

Or so he thought.

It crept up on him slowly, with all the relentless patience and irresistible brutality of tectonic plates. His trousers started
getting tighter, cutting a bright pink band of pain around his midriff, which he didn’t even notice until he unbuttoned them
at night.


He finally, with some reluctance, gave up the morning wrestling match, lying flat on the bed, trying to tug two-and-a-half-feet
width of material over three feet of waistline, and moved up a size.


Thirty-two inches. Thirty-four. Thirty-six.

After that, things started to get harder. He spent many a Saturday on his hands and knees in obscure corners of department
stores and tailors’ shops, desperately seeking out a stray pair of Wranglers in the inexplicably, unfairly and unforgivably
rare size of thirty-eight inches.


He still remembered the glorious day he had chanced across a pair of branded khaki slacks that measured an insanely generous
forty-two inches. Forty-two inches! How had they come into being? Were they discarded props from Land of the Giants? Had they been part of a clothing consignment bound for Texas that had been caught by the wind and somehow wafted all the
way across the Atlantic to land in this very store? Whatever mysterious magic brought them there, they were Grenville’s now.
True, they were slacks, but Gren had long ago given up even dreaming of making a stab at dressing fashionably. Simply being able to dress at all
was ambition enough.


They were slacks, but they fitted him. They fitted him easily. And for a while, Grenville enjoyed the bliss of sartorial comfort again. Experienced the indescribable delight of
owning a pair of trousers that zipped up without a struggle. A pair of trousers that didn’t force his testicles to grind together
like Tibetan worry balls with every step. He wanted to seek out the magnificent seamstress who had constructed those ingenious
pantaloons, smother her with kisses, shower her with gifts and propose marriage.


And then, one day, and all too soon, even the forty-two-inchers could no longer accommodate him. True, he’d worn them virtually
non-stop for the best part of two years, and they were all but falling to pieces, but his drifting girth had outgrown them
anyway.


He went hunting again, but after five consecutive Saturdays of crawling through obscure piles of stock to no avail, he had
to face up to the terrible truth.


It could no longer be blamed on the moronity and shortsightedness of all clothing manufacturers, their suppliers, their buyers
and the bastard parents who spawned them all.


Grenville Roberts was no longer Off The Peg.

Somehow, he had fallen outside the accepted limits of human dimensions. He was no longer a member of the category labelled
‘normal’.


In a curiously insane twist of logic, the only sort of apparel he could reasonably expect to buy in a regular clothing store
that might actually fit him was sportswear. Drawstring jogging bottoms, jogging tops and offensively coloured plastic shell
suits.


Now, just exactly who, along the clothing supply and demand chain, took the imprisonably lunatic decision that the only clothing
that overweight people might ever be allowed to purchase should be ugly exercise gear? That all fat people really yearned
for was unsightly neon-orange and lime-green jogging suits. Did this madman look out of his window one day and say: ‘You know
what: all you ever see these fat people doing is running and exercising. If we could only cater to that market, we’ll make a mint.’ Whoever he was, the man was a fucking business genius. You have to take your
hat off to him. Though, let’s face it, it will probably be a pink and purple baseball cap.


But you mustn’t get the impression that Grenville stood idly by and allowed all this to happen to him. That he just let the
weight pile on and on without trying to get on top of it, to wrest back control of his body from his mad metabolism. He did
not go quietly into that dark night.


He dieted. Of course he dieted. He dieted to Olympic standards.

He gave up fats. He gave up sugars. He gave up dairy. Red meat? Forget about it. He even, Lord have mercy, gave up alcohol. He gave up any food that was in any way remotely pleasant. He ate bread the same texture and flavour as sandpaper-encrusted
cardboard smeared with the merest hint of fly duty posing as tasty yeast spread. Then he gave up wheat altogether. He found
himself eating tiny garamflour pancakes smudged with a tiny suggestion of Fuck Me If That’s Not Butter. And then he read a
terrifying article about the carcinogenic properties of chickpeas and had to relinquish even this pathetic balm to the appetite.
He became sitophobic: from being a sensual delight to anticipate with pleasure, food now seemed to belong in the same category
as weapons of mass destruction. The fat content of nuts made them as deadly as bullets. An avocado pear started looking as
lethal as an anti-personnel fragmentation grenade.


He joined clubs. He had red days and green days. He lived only on Speedslim shakes. He followed Rosemary Conley’s advice for
his hips and his tum. Then he stopped combining proteins and carbohydrates. Then he gave up carbohydrates altogether. Then
he gave up proteins and carbohydrates. He never snacked. He would sooner have shot his own mother than have eaten a chocolate bar. He stopped eating
altogether after one o’clock in the afternoon. He tried living on raw fish and rice. Then he even gave up the rice. He ate kelp. Kelp and only kelp, Lord have mercy.


And each new effort, each new push, would produce the same results. For the first few weeks, he would lose weight. Then he
would stop losing weight and tighten up his regimen. He would lose a little more weight, and plateau out again. Then he would
be starving, eating only nonsense, and still not losing weight, and he would give up. Then, in a few short weeks, he would
be back at his original size, and then some.


And one day, he found himself standing in front of a salad bar and realised there was nothing in there he was allowed to eat,
that he’d ingeniously managed to negotiate himself into a position where pretty much all he thought about was food, and yet
he could not eat any of it.


So he gave up giving up.

He decided that if he’d never started any of this diet nonsense, he’d probably be about four stone lighter than he was right
now. Enough was enough. Or rather not enough was enough. He would eat what he wanted, within reason.


And that worked, in a way, for a while. His girth stopped growing. It wasn’t going away, but it wasn’t getting any bigger.

Result: happiness. After a fashion.

And then he met The Girl.

He’d imagined all that was behind him, that he’d never have to go through all that dating palaver again, and he’d settled
into his fairly comfortable and happily successful routine, was almost cruising through his slightly lonely existence, when
Blam! she’d walked through the door of his life, and he was, to all intents and purposes, sixteen again.


And he’d gone back to the diet drawing board.

It was hard to find one that hadn’t already failed him at least once. He managed to boil it down to the GI diet and the Paul
McKenna ‘I Can Make You Thinner’ regime. Paul McKenna sounded quite interesting, but Gren had serious doubts about employing mesmerism as a dietary aid, so he plumped for the GI, which seemed like an almost sane version of Atkins.
Once again, he’d stripped out his kitchen cupboards and stocked them only with acceptable fare. Once again, he’d studied the
diet guides, not that they were called diets any more. All new diets nowadays started off with ‘This is not a diet’, for some reason. And, once again, he had to face up to the advice that exercise was an essential prerequisite to
success.


Which meant but one thing.

It meant he had to swallow his pride, having first assessed its calorific value and Glycemic Index, of course, and go back
to the gym.


Gren laid out the hideously coloured jogging suit on the bed and sighed a long, weary sigh of acceptance.

Jeremy Slank woke with an erection so towering, it would have required all four of the valiant marines from the Iwo Jima monument
to prop it upright. He enjoyed that rare and blissful pleasure of waking from a wonderful dream to an even more wonderful
reality. This had every chance of being the very best day of his life. The Groundhog Day he would choose, if ever the option
arose, to live over and over again for the rest of eternity.


His eyes and his memory still being a little sleep-fogged, he blindly patted the bed beside him in case there was anyone there
with whom to share his random engorgement. The chances, these days, were about 70-30 in his favour. But there was no flesh
within his reach. Oh, well. Not too much of a disappointment. He often found a dream-induced stiffy had very little to do
with sexual desire, and had oftentimes had a good deal of trouble coaxing it into something more purposeful once he’d initiated
a grappling session. Besides, morning sex was not his favourite pursuit. All that avoiding each other’s bad breath and bad
hair and stale perfume tended to put a dampener on desire.


He rose and slipped on his dressing gown. His penis protruded from it comically, like a pink Dalek’s eye. He swaggered around
the bedroom for a few moments, exclaiming ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ till his erection began to wilt and it was possible
to contemplate peeing.


For Jeremy, hygiene, both personal and domestic, was a necessary evil, to be performed in the shortest possible time, and
preferably whilst simultaneously doing something else more useful. During the brief, weekly scamper over the living room carpet with the vacuum cleaner, for instance, he would be listening to a podcast or an audio book on his iPod. He would
wash the pots – again, once a week – whilst making his obligatory parental phone call with his Bluetooth headset on.


In this spirit, his morning ablutions had become fine-tuned to an almost ritualistic routine. He would lay out his clothes
for the day on the bed, stacked in reverse order, so his suit jacket would be on the bottom and his socks and underpants
on the top. He would click on the shower room light and enter. He would then load up his toothbrush, which lay on top of his
cistern, in precise order next to his toothpaste, his can of shaving foam, his razor, mouthwash, deodorant, aftershave and
cologne. He would turn on the hot tap in the sink, then sit on the loo, simultaneously evacuating his bodily waste whilst
cleaning his teeth. By the time he’d performed both of these functions, the water would be warm enough for his shave. He would
turn on the shower and then shave, swiftly, if not comprehensively, then rinse off the razor, the toothbrush and the sink,
before pouring himself a capful of mouthwash and moving the bath towel from the back of the door to the radiator by the shower
cubicle, where it would be convenient for the wetly blind post-shower grab. The shower would now be warm enough to use, and
he would shower and gargle at the same time. The shower routine was rigidly observed: wash hair, then armpits, then crack,
sac and penis, and let the rest of the body take care of itself. Rinse off, step out. Dry hair, back and armpits, wrap towel
around waist, apply roll-on deodorant, then aftershave, then cologne. He would sit on the bed and drag his socks on his clammy
feet, which very act would dry his bottom sufficiently for the application of underpants.


He would be fresh and dressed, if still a little damp, within seven and a half minutes from rising. He had striven to improve
this time, but any attempts at short cuts had led to minor disasters, including unsightly shaving cuts, dried soap stains
around the neck or the omission of one or more odour inhibitors and a subsequent perceptible drop in office popularity.


All of which meant he now had a small window (thirteen minutes) before he thrust himself into commuter bedlam. Time for a
coffee, of the instant kind, and a phone call, of the subtly bragging kind.


But to which friend might he best flaunt his latest success? Why, obviously the one who was currently failing most. As Gore
Vidal said: it is not enough to succeed: others must fail. Derrian, then. Derrian did something naff in the City, and, rumour
was, had been doing it rather badly of late.


Derrian didn’t quite qualify onto Jeremy’s cellphone speed-dial. He was, in fact, Jeremy noted, the thirty-fifth entry in
the handset’s phone book. As the call connected, Jeremy wondered where he ranked in Derrian’s contact list. Probably in the
top twenty, if not in the speed-dial list itself. He was, after all, in Government now. More or less.


‘Yeah, mate. All right?’ There seemed to be a lot of shouting where Derrian was. The Exchange? Christ. Did he start work before
eight o’clock? Barbaric.


‘I’m good, my friend.’ Jeremy adjusted his tie in the mirror and wondered if a blob of hair gel might be called for. ‘Long
time no powwow.’


‘Yeah, mate. What’s happenin’?’ ‘Mate’, again? He’d been spending too much time with those barrow-boy traders, had old Derrian.

‘Wondered if you’d like to hook up for lunch some time?’

‘Sounds good. When?’

‘Well, let’s see. Can’t make it today, I’ve—’

‘Not today, mate.’

Damn! Boastus interuptus. Maybe he could still squeeze it in. ‘Well, obviously not today. I’ve got a—’


‘Not this week, mate. I’m in Brussels.’

‘Brussels?’ Bloody hell. Jeremy struggled not to sound interested.

‘Yeah, mate. Then next week, bloody Amsterdam.’

Brussels? Amsterdam? Jeremy was buggered if he was going to ask why. ‘Cool. Just call me when you get back.’


‘No problemo, mate. Catch you later.’ And Derrian disconnected him.

Disconnected him. The pikey bastard. No opportunity, no gap at all, to drop his proud little bombshell.


Can’t make it today. Got a big yawn of a meeting with the bloody Prime Minister. Mate.

Jeremy grabbed his breakfast from the Prêt À Manger by the Tube. A carrot juice and some sort of shitty muesli pot with yoghurt and honey. Given a choice, he’d rather have tucked
into a full greasy spoon café fry-up. In fact, given a choice between the shitty pot of yoghurty muesli and a blender full
of used French letters, he’d have opted for the condom smoothie, but he was briefing on health; he was, to all intents and
purposes, a health expert, and he really had to show willing.


In the Tube, he was crammed between a disgustingly fat woman and the rest of the disgustingly fat woman. She really was enormous.
Herman Melville could have written a book about her. When the train lurched off, he was seriously worried he might trip and
fall into her voluminous bosom and suffocate before a rescue team could winch him out again. How did they live with themselves,
people that gross? How did she find time to travel on the Tube? Surely you had to spend every waking minute eating pure hydrogenized
saturated fat to maintain those dimensions. He noticed with revulsion that there was something glistening greasily on the
woman’s chin, no doubt a remnant of the pint of melted lard she’d quaffed that morning, doubtless to wash down the whole suckling
pig she’d consumed for breakfast, and her breathing was laboured and unpleasant. He began to feel nauseous. Then he was suddenly
struck by a terrible vision of him puking up all over the seated commuters, and the woman falling on them greedily to lap
up his vomit, and he had to get out.


He fought his way out of the carriage at the next stop and crammed himself into the adjacent one. As the train moved off again,
he caught a glimpse of the blimp woman in the next carriage through the intersecting windows. She’d spotted him. She’d realised
why he’d moved carriages, and a look of deep, resonant sadness filled her eyes before she cast them down at the floor.


A brief, a very brief, pang of guilt stabbed him, but he dismissed it easily. Yeah, well. She should do something about it,
the weak-willed cow. Nobody was forcing her to eat whole herds of animals on a daily basis. No one put a gun to her head and
made her devour the entire Irish potato harvest at every sitting. She needed educating. And educating fat people was what
Jeremy was about to get famous for.


He joined the flow out of the Tube station and paused for a few minutes at the Emporio Armani window, his second-favourite
shop, suppliers of the very nice suit for which he’d stretched the plastic especially for today’s meeting. Of course, he’d
like to have a full-blown regular Armani suit, but that was out of his reach, just for the moment. Soon, very soon, he would
be able to crank up his spending a gear or two, restock his wardrobe with full-on Armani, and his treasured Emporio suits
would be gracing the racks in his local Mencap shop.


He moved on. Now here was his favourite shop. A high-quality lingerie store. La Perla knickers. Wolford stockings and tights.
The stuff that drool is made of. He was amazed how thoroughly aroused he could become looking at these items adorning lifeless
mannequins. Christ, they didn’t need to have arms or legs to turn him on. They didn’t even need heads. What did that say about the male libido? What did it say about him?


He bounded up the steps to the office, thinking he’d definitely need a shag tonight and thumbed through his phone’s contact
list in the lift, looking for his most likely prospect.


Hayleigh knew the alarm was coming. Her hand was hovering over the stop button for several minutes before the first hint of
a buzz, and she managed to snap down on it before it had a chance to disturb anyone else in the house. Wednesday. Crap. Wednesday
was just about the cruddiest day imaginable. Possibly, it was worse, even, than Monday. Because here you were, adrift and
becalmed, slap bang in the middle of the week, the last Saturday morning long gone, and next Saturday so far off in the distance,
you could hardly make it out on the horizon.


She swung out of bed and tucked her feet into her novelty kitten slippers. It was cold, of course. The heating wouldn’t go
on for another half an hour, and Mum refused to leave it on all night because it was unhealthy. They could be stuck in a snowdrift
in the middle of the Ice Age and Mum would not keep the heating on overnight.


She shivered into her oversized dressing gown and padded into her bathroom. She felt around for the string dangling from the
ceiling and tugged on it. The sudden shock of light stabbed into her eyes and she winced and squinted. It hurt a lot. Tears
were actually forming. Her eyes seemed to be getting more and more sensitive to intense light. Photo-phobia, it was called.
She’d looked it up on Wikipedia.


When her eyes adjusted she looked up. To her absolute horror, her towel had slipped from her bathroom mirror and she was face
to face with her own reflection. She stood t. . .