Leith, William (4 page)

Thinking about this makes me feel a rising sense of something bad, a nameless dread, something I don't like at all, and I eat some more pretzels and drink some coffee and ask for more coffee and land at JFK airport and buy a Hershey bar after I get through customs and marvel, briefly, at the way I still buy a Hershey bar when I land in America, even though I could buy a Hershey bar any day of the week in the deli across the street from my flat in London. I eat the Hershey bar, which is not the exciting, semi-mythical experience I want it to be, in three bites.

Carb City

I take a cab across the bridge to Manhattan. Here it is Carb City, one of the world's great carbohydrate centres. Here, the buildings rise up out of a bed of carbs. Follow each gleaming hive down to the ground and there it is, at the bottom a

starch-crammed deli or diner, a pharmacy groaning with crispy snacks and cookies and breakfast cereal. This is a place where_ you can get yourself carbed up in any style you want you can give yourself a blood-sugar spike with doughnuts and bagels and croissants and rolls, with pitta breads and flatbreads, with Danish pastries and English muffins and Polish bialys, with potato chips and corn chips, with blinis, fries, pasta, rice, potatoes, noodles. Immigrants from all over the world have brought their carbs here, adapted them, refined them and enlarged them. A New York croissant, for instance, is exactly twice the size of a croissant in Paris.

It's dinnertime for me, even though it's only late afternoon here, so I sit on a stool at a bar and watch sushi coming towards me on a conveyor belt, and I pick out a plate, two slices of raw tuna on matchbox-sized puddingy sushi rice, and I eat the tuna sushi in five bites, and I pick out, and eat, two slices of raw salmon on rice, and two slices of cooked, flattened prawns on rice, and two chewy strips of octopus on rice. I pick it up in my chopsticks, dip it in soy sauce, and chomp it with robotic, pleasureless vigour, always more interested in the sushi I'm about to eat than in the sushi I'm actually eating. I pick the prawns up in my chopsticks and slide them into my mouth, nipping off the tails with my incisors, picking the nipped-off bits of tail from between my lips with my chopsticks, placing the tails with a flourish on the empty plate. Cool. I hope the waiters are watching. I'm still hungry, or rather not quite sated, so I order a hand roll, a cone of seaweed filled with the puddingy rice, and also mayonnaise and seafood, and unfortunately I am sated by the

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time it arrives, but I eat it anyway, chomping it while I watch bits of salmon sashimi and California rolls buzz past me at the level of my fingers, and I'm filled with nausea and also a sort of greed that borders on the pornographic, and later, a few hours later, I go to a seafood place and have something really healthy, tuna and brown rice, a whole fucking mound of brown rice, and by the time I go to bed I feel painfully bloated, as if someone had cut me open and crammed something large and indigestible into my stomach, and sewn me up really tight, and, just as I'm falling asleep, I wonder if, maybe, starting tomorrow, for a little while at least, I should do Atkins.

The Swimming Pool

I have this memory from the last time I was not at all fat, ten years ago. My girlfriend at the time, Anna, was staying with some friends in a villa somewhere in the middle of France. It was hot. I travelled down on my own, and arrived in the afternoon. It was a fine place, big, with good furniture, a swimming pool, a few girls lounging by the pool, wearing not much. I walked out to the pool in a T-shirt and shorts. I was down to 190 lbs. I'd taken the weight off by playing tennis about 200 times over the course of a year, and swimming, and jogging, and going for long, brisk walks. I had become fixated with exercise. I ate and drank what I liked.

So I'm standing by the pool, chatting away, being introduced to people, and up comes Anna's brother, who is also an old friend of mine, and he's holding a racquet and a ball. He's

on the other side of the pool. He tells me he's invented a game, which is hitting the ball across the pool to each other, and if you mis-hit the ball, and it falls in the pool, you have to jump in and get it.

`Come on then,' he says.

I can feel panic rising in me. I know what's going to happen next.

`You'd better take your shirt off,' he says.

I'm wondering how I can get out of this, what diversionary tactic I can use, whether I should just jump in and ... but nothing would work. I am trapped. I look around me, choked with the fat person's panic at having to reveal your body, and I realise there's only one thing I can do. I'll have to take my shirt off. The girls are watching, mildly interested. And I take my T-shirt off. And I'm slim. Of course I'm slim. I'm 190 Lbs. Waist size 31. I had forgotten.

What Does It Feel Like to Be Slim?

So there I am, standing at the edge of the pool, stripped to the waist, holding my T-shirt in one hand. I'm slim. What does it feel like?

I let the T-shirt fall to the ground. I pick up a racquet and play tennis across the pool, and sometimes look at Anna, sitting on a lounger in a skimpy sundress and I think no underwear. She is taking no notice of us, talking to a girl called Suzanne who wants to write a novel. Anna herself wants to write a novel, probably about a girl who wears skimpy dresses and no underwear, and has men running around after her.

After a while I dive into the pool and swim up and down, obsessed with the calories I'm burning, feeling high from the exercise, swimming twenty, thirty, forty, fifty lengths, not wanting to stop. I could go on for hours. From my low vantage point I am even more sure that Anna is not wearing any underwear.

She gets up and walks towards the house without saying anything to me. I hoist myself out of the pool and follow her. She walks through the French window and into her bedroom our bedroom.

`Is this our bedroom?'

`I've been staying here, yes.'

We hug. Or rather, I hug her. She stands still, and does not actively resist being hugged.

For a while, perhaps ten seconds, perhaps an aeon, nothing much happens. Then Anna turns away from me. She slips out of her dress, freeing the straps, stepping with exaggerated delicacy out of the ring of cotton on the wooden floor. I walk towards her and place my hands on her shoulders.

`Maybe later,' she says.

She had humiliated me when I was fat. Now I'm slim. With her back to me, she steps into her underpants. Then she puts on another dress and a pair of sandals with pointy little heels.

Later that evening, at a restaurant near the villa, I pack away a lot of food a fried starter, a steak with runny sauce, a couple of helpings of fried potatoes, some vegetables, a tart. The food is great.

I look across the table at Anna. She is tanned. She is not saying much to me. The waiter is grinning, bringing another bottle of wine because I'm drinking so much.

`Cheers,' I say, and hold out my glass, wanting more.

That's what it felt like. I wanted more. A snapshot from the slim world. I'm 32 years old. Waist size: 31. 191 lbs.

Breakfast

I wake up on the day after the fattest day of my life, and I'm hungry, and I think: 'I'll do Atkins,' and I think: 'I won't do Atkins,' and I think: 'I'll do Atkins.'

I step into the elevator and plummet to the ground, at the expense of no calories, and get outside and walk around, looking for somewhere to not eat carbs. Almost immediately I walk past two mobile carb stalls offering pastries, croissants, rolls, bagels. I am disturbingly hungry. I want carbs. I don't want carbs. I enter a diner on Lower Broadway. There is a big tray full of fried potatoes. Loaves are stacked on the counter. Bagels are stacked. Doughnuts, muffins, pastries are stacked. When I bulk into my seat, the table jolts and makes a scraping noise on the wooden floor. People look up. Fat guy bumping into table.

I look at the menu. It frightens me. Menus always frighten me. Jesus I can have granola, oatmeal, griddle cakes, bagels, muffins, many types of toast. Maybe I'm not ready for Atkins. Maybe I'm not ready.

`Ready to order, sir?'

`Will you give me a couple of minutes?'

Four minutes tick by.

`Ready to order, sir?'

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I go for an egg-white omelette. The waiter pushes me into having toast. He says, 'What sort of toast do you want?' `What sort do you have?'

`White, granary, wholemeal, sourdough, ciabatta, French stick, rye.'

`Uh, wholemeal.'

Seconds pass. Minutes pass. I pick up my knife and fork. I look at these objects first the knife, then the fork. My fingers bend around the knife and fork in a way that is familiar, reassuring. They might almost be parts of my own body.

I stare at my knife and fork. I am edgy. My fork has four tines. My knife has a rounded end. It is sharp along the lower edge and blunt along the upper. I can see my double chin reflected in its glinting surface.

My grandmother, my father's mother (b. 1894), used to tell me that I should not touch my knife and fork before the arrival of my food, that this was rude, a sign of greed, of bad attitude, of bad breeding. Picking up the knife and fork before the food arrives is a sign that you are greedy, that you will be fat. Premature cutlery pick-up, she believed, was a model of what was wrong with society in general. Knives and forks exist to promote civilised eating. You sit at a table, upon which your food is placed. As an activity, eating is conducted in the open, transparently. Everything is upright, decent, 'on the table'. Nothing is furtive. Nothing is 'under the table'. Everybody can see what everybody else is eating. Everybody's food is distinct from everybody else's. When the food arrives, and only when the food arrives, do you touch your cutlery.

Right now, if it were up to me, I'd chuck the fork away and eat with my fingers. I'm feeling medieval, pre-fork. According

to John Beckmann, the historian of inventions, people in England in the Middle Ages regarded the fork as 'an effeminate piece of finery'. I'd go along with that. Who used forks? The French, that's who. I mean, in the Stone Age, people would use knives made out of bits of flint. They would hack away at meat when they needed to. But mostly they ate with their fingers. People didn't really use forks until the eighteenth century, the age of frock coats and powdered wigs. The fork says, 'Look at me! I'm not particularly hungry!'

I am.

When my food arrives, the first thing I want to eat is the toast. So I pick up a slice of the toast, and I start buttering it. My resolve is crumbling already. I know that, to kill it off completely, all I have to do is put this piece of toast in my mouth. Then I'll feel better. I can interview Dr Atkins, write about him in a knowing, cynical way, go home, and forget about him. As I'm contemplating this, the waiter takes the order from the next table.

`What sort of toast do you want?'

The guy at the next table says, 'No toast. We're doing a little Atkins thing here.'

I put my toast down. I don't touch it again. I eat the egg-white omelette, fast, as if I am trying to kill it and eat it at the same time. I brandish my cutlery with cruel, slashing precision.

I am d'Artagnan. I am Errol Flynn.

And then I walk through the diner, away from the fried potatoes and the stacked loaves, the English and American muffins, the Danish pastries, the Belgian waffles; away from my religion and out into the cold, carb-scented air of Manhattan.

An Historic Moment

Five minutes later I'm standing on Lower Broadway, looking in the window of a newsagent, and the news is bad for fat people. There's a display of magazines as high as my head, and they're all telling me the same thing.

Breaking news: be slim. Slim is good. If you're not slim, you won't get what you want. If you're not slim, you will not be happy.

This just in: if you're not slim, you don't exist.

I'm looking at pictures of women with slim bodies, the sort of pictures I've been looking at for years, decades, images designed to make women dislike themselves. But I'm also looking at men. Men, stripped to the waist, arms toned, shoulders flexed, pectorals coiled torsos knuckled like fists. Mostly I'm looking at stomachs. These are magazines about stomachs. LOSE YOUR GUT. SHRINK YOUR GUT. FIRMER ABS IN 28 DAYS. GET BETTER SEX. GET MORE SEX. GET HER TO AGREE TO ANYTHING.

I don't believe this, of course. But that's not quite true. The truth is: I don't want to believe it. But part of me believes it. Part of me thinks that, if I had a stomach like these stomachs, I could get women to agree to anything. With a stomach like this, I would have no fear. I would be ... a real guy. These stomachs they are awesome. These stomachs are smooth, shiny, polished. They are sectioned. They are like the bellies of reptiles. They are protective carapaces. Each stomach is a shield, a prophylactic against male vulnerability. They are ripped. They are cut. They are six-packs. Hell, some of them are EIGHT-packs.

Me, I have a one-pack. My stomach looks like dough after it has risen, before it has been baked. When I saw a recent TV ad for Reebok running shoes, in which a fat disembodied belly chases a man all over town, I had several thoughts in quick succession. The first thought was the ad's slogan, which was 'Belly's gonna get ya!'. Too true, I thought. The second was that this was an historic moment. For years, we've seen images of women's bodies chopped up into their constituent parts, and now this is happening to men. And the third thought was: That's my belly. That's my belly out there. It looks like dough.

And the fourth thought was: Where can I buy those shoes?

Now I'm looking at the stomach magazines and wondering if I should buy a stomach magazine and thinking that if I bought a stomach magazine I would be fine, fine. And I'm thinking about my own belly, which fills me with a familiar nameless dread, and I want to eat, but I don't want to eat, and I can feel my belly pressing outwards against my jacket, straining to get out, straining to get out and chase me through the streets.

And I wonder: how did I get here?

Fat History

I didn't get fat until I was eight years old and my family moved to Canada, and I suddenly started thinking and acting like a fat person. When I tell people this, they say it must have been something to do with the burgers and the fries and the popcorn and the hot dogs. And I say that, yes, the food might