SHORT STORIES: Fat Feeders of Frodsham

John Bennett mixes another spoon of goose fat into the opaque fitting attached to the blender and clicks the on button upwards. The mixture turns from a sugary liquid into a sticky spunk like dough, folding and unfolding as an edible cement.

Next, he melts chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan, declining to suck on the spoon, instead knocking the residue into baking tray upon which he spears the mixture.

With a lime coloured plastic spatula, he levels the cake evenly, perhaps two inches in depth – fully covering the oblong tray.

He pours over the chocolate and places this in a hot oven at 200 °C, snapping shut the Jamie Oliver Cook Book, shouting as he does, in a cockney twang, ‘Happy Days.’

Adding a table spoon of lard, he mixes this fast, leaning over the bowl before knocking the stubborn residue onto the tray with a plastic spoon.

Taking a drink from a sleek tumbler, part of a retro set of various colours from Matalan, he drinks quickly, letting out a belch that hangs in the air like a dung filled balloon.

Looking out through the window over the sink, he watches a schoolgirl on a mobile phone, a car edging from the drive of Mr Reynolds opposite, the trumpet head of a daffodil dozing on the evening breeze, all these everyday things he muses – these segments that make up a life.

He jolts from his melancholy as a key turns in the front door porch, its frosted pane suddenly filling in a kaleidoscope colour of fabric and skin and plastic – the figure of a woman suddenly filling the void, created by its opening.

The door edges open and in his peripheral vision she nudges closer, carrying various shades of slogans branded across bags in plastic and cork. He throws the reluctant lard and the tube of goose fat into the recess of a hidden cupboard high to the left of the electric hob upon which lies a stain of cream that sizzles slightly and then rests silent as a dead cow.

He looks up, checking that the cupboard door is invisible – that the lines that ordinarily reveal the presence of such areas of storage, are not visible – an invisible cupboard, they call it, in joinery circles.

She stands before him, groaning under the weight of the fruits of her retail expedition.

“Those escalators, they really will be the death of me” she moots, leaning against the island, like Majorca in the middle of a Mediterranean kitchen, him, somewhere near the Straits of Gibraltar, a useless baboon, lingering by the sink bowl, hurriedly pouring cheap merlot into a glass from Asda’s own brand.

“You have a bath love, dinner will be ready in an hour or so – it’s all ready for you. I’ve bubbled up the lavender – your favourite. I’ve put your bathrobe in the tumble dryer so it’s nice and warm. I’ve hung it behind the door. Maybe after dinner?”

He lets out a SydJamesesque laugh and she pushes up her breasts; contriving for the moment to find cleavage from where before there was nothing but a xylophone of a chest.

“Ohhhhhh matron” he coos like a sex starved pigeon. She winks, leaving the bags in the hallway and departs up the boxed stairwell, wiggling as she ascends, cellulite like blancmange wobbling across her trifle like thighs.

He picks up a frame on the window sill, next to a cactus and a low fat cookbook which he now places on the pulpit on the page of the recipe that he has just cooked.

She is barely recognizable from the figure that has just passed through the hallway and up the stairs.

On the photograph, she’s perched on a white ribbon of sand – a green sea and blue sky framed like a Rothko beyond her – wearing a skinny khaki bikini – perhaps a size 8.

Her smile reveals sharp cheekbones running down to a sleek and angular mouth. Her eyes are bright and curious slanting at the edges beneath long straight auburn hair under the horizon of a blunt fringe.

He places the photograph in the cupboard with the other ingredients. There’s no handle on this cupboard. Only he knows of its existence – created like a secret library in a Scooby Do house.

He grins at his creativity whilst consulting the note book he has taken from the cupboard. He considers the graph with its axis of weight and dress size on either side. Like a demand and supply curve in economics it rises at first gradually before in the later stages (from months 4 to 7 – the current position) appearing like a cartoon mountain – almost peaking off the A4 sheet of constricted squares, some doodled upon with faces and squiggles and at the peak of the current weight size ratio – a smiley face like an 80’s ecstasy tablet.

He stirs the seafood risotto – he vows has only 280 calories per serving and places the lid of the orange faux La Creuseut saucepan and leaves it to simmer.

Upstairs, in the sunken bath, she (Claire) is riding the handle of a hairbrush, the screams of her orgasm muffled both by the sounds of the Jacuzzi and a damp flannel that she squeezes into her mouth.

She’s thinking about the young barista who served her a skinny latte in Café Latino that morning, imagining her homemade dildo to be his real life member, thrusting into her throbbing inners, the smell of a double espresso mingling with the stench of her rabid tingling cunt.

He in the meantime is downstairs in his under the stair converted office, sending an email to his friend confirming this week’s results:

“Hi Big Brian: how are tricks? You’ll be pleased (or jealous ☺) to learn that we have reached this week, my rotund comrade, a milestone…yes, at last, and I concede it has taken slightly longer than I would have liked (and 3 weeks and 2 days longer than Colin “the t**t”) to reach, but she is last a ……..wait for it (drum role)…..ohhhhh…..a size 16).

He awaits a response. 5 minutes pass. The shell of a muscle contracts and shoots like an Exocet at the underside of the lid.

He rises from his desk, strikes a match and lights a faux eighteenth century candle stick brought from a readers offer from the Daily Mail and some liquid protein that is both odourless and tasteless {and according to his gym instructor, extremely expansive}.

He hears the cushioned footsteps of her feet, manicured and slippered; hopefully wearing beneath her dressing gown, the newly acquired underwear.

He resists adding more goose fat and turns off the hob, carefully stirring the rice and the tinny cacophony of the shell fish; reluctantly discarding two clams that stoically remain unopened, poisonous and dead as a river rat.

The gritty phlegm of an orange cockle sinks beneath the creamy rice as he checks upon the progress of the Frisbee sized rostis that brown and sizzle in the searing heat of the oven.

Turning off the appliances he returns quickly to the laptop and opens an unread email, a flush of excitement passing through his plump reddening face.

“You lucky f**** barsteward. If you fell in shit you’d come up smelling of clover. If you dropped your toast it would land butter side up. You really are Mr B a lucky f**** barstewardyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyybut hey☺ I love you for it (I suppose lol☺)”.

“Colin, you really are a one ;0” he replies and snaps the computer closed as he hears the padding of his wife’s feet entered the tiled floor of the kitchen.

“My oh my,” he blinks exaggeratedly resembling, he hopes a young Kenneth Williams.

“Am I the luckiest man alive or what? What I have done to deserve this?”

He stretches his hand up and moves it diagonally across his body before moving it up again whilst singing Yazz and the Plastic Population “the only way is up…..baby……you and me now……the only way is up.”

And with that, he places his head down and performs a functionary bow to his imaginary audience.

She opens up her dressing gown and reveals the Basque, all western saloon whorehouse in purple lace and satin.

He lets out another verse of “…the only way is up ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh baby” raising his hand skywards, before diving down, straight between her satin shimmering legs.

She reaches out for his knob and unzips it just as he lets out a hollow breath.

She pulls away her hand, drenched in ejaculation.

He looks down and puts away his flaccid cock.

“Oh well; never mind” she proffers “why don’t you go and change whilst I put on another CD…something more uplifting…a bit of Lighthouse Family?”

He disappears up the staircase, puts on some blue joggers and a matching sweatshirt from Next.

He rolls up the underpants and the slacks and puts these in a separate draw in the pine sideboard and descends the stairs, through the hallway and into the kitchen where his wife is singing to the indivisible chorus/verse to “Lifted” – Their Song.

As he steps onto the fake quarry tiled floor, he exclaims:

“Oh chilly floor oh my poor chilled soles.”

She approaches him and takes him into a ballroom grasp – twirling him around the room, kissing the thinning top of his scalp what is perhaps 5 inches beneath hers.

“There there: my lovely prince. There there – mummy will warm you up.”

And then with a swirl, on what must be the final chorus, she picks him up, his slight frame soaring vertically like the girl in an ice dance duo: “lifted; yeah lifted……..you could be lifted….yeahhhh……lifted…….you could be lifted……lifted……yeahhhh.”

“Come on darling, dish me up your lovely cuisine and we can settle down in front of the telly. We’ve got Popstars Sky plussed. Doesn’t get any better than that eh?”

She sits at the table revealing an expanse of leg, crisscrossed with stockings and a frilly lace garter.

He ladles thick creamy risotto into two bowls purchased at TK Max upon which he places the rosti on the vacant half left by the bowl.

He lays the plates on the bamboo placemats and forces with the cork from a bottle of Asti purchased from the garage on the way home.

He pours the liquid, fizzing and popping, into a flute and leans over to lick her ear.

She chews on the thick rings of squid and the creamy rice, carefully dipping the tip of a cockle into the garlic mayonnaise he has created using goose fat, garlic, eggs and chives.

“This is good” she stutters as she swallows.

He – chewing a New Zealand greenback, smiles and raises his glass to her:

“Only the best for you darling.”

They spend the rest of the evening watching Popstars and then the latest Big Brother eviction, she wanking him to the sneer of Davina Mcall shouting to the studio audience and the millions of dead heads at home: “We know you want it. “

They drift off to sleep on the sofa, she dreaming of some film star fucking her on a travel brochure beach, he of them driving, top down in a Porsche Boxster along some snaking country road.

Waking before climax, she disappears upstairs to finish herself off, this time, filling herself with the chocolate, caramel and nougat of a king sized Twix.

He wakes on the sofa as the white shafts of early sun slash through the uneven curtains.

Putting on brown slacks and a thick check shirt, he descends the stairs and makes his way to the lounge.

He switches on his laptop – an email from Colin flashing into view.

“Hey, Mr B, how goes it?” Well; without appearing to crow; I’ve done it, I’ve only just gone and bloody done it Rodney (he says in a David Jason cockney way). She’s a fucking 20. A fucking 20. Can you believe it? She’s made an appointment with a specialist. Thinks she has some problems with her lymph gland! Something to aspire to eh ☺☺lol.”

John Bennett doesn’t respond. He looks out through the bay window across to the houses opposite. Curtains pulled apart, the rumble of lawn movers starting over like distant thunder, vacuum cleaners revving up, housewives hanging out lines of towels and pants and husbands shirts, bellowing as tedious ghosts

He feels a knot of rage the size of an avocado, exploding as guacamole in his blubbery stomach, a cyclone twisting up his body, through his chest, his windpipe, a force nine gale spinning in his mouth.

F*** Colin…..how on earth has he managed that. She was a 14 only 8 weeks ago. OMG is what he is thinking, O bloody M bloody G.

Snapping shut his computer, he collects the bucket from beneath the sink and boils the kettle. He adds the carwash mixture bought from the shopping channel and exits through the back door, collecting the car cleaning pack from the utility room before making his way through the side gate to the front drive.

He applies the brush to the bucket and splashes the water onto the metallic paint. He begins with the windows and works his way around the car, carefully extending the window wipers, protruding like walrus tusks.

He finishes by polishing the Hyundai logo and he can’t help but flush with joy as he applies the cloth to the badge – a car he has dreamed about before he traded up his Nissan Micra only 6 months before.

At that point, he was single, still living with his mother with a job as a trainee solicitor in the local council office. Now he has found himself a lovely wife (courtesy of find-a-mate.com), has a new build 3 bed house and a car of his dreams (courtesy of the inheritance left by his mother who 9 months earlier tragically demised in a freak agricultural incident in the nearby farm where she was picking her own elderberries).

As he packs away his utensils, he thinks of Colin and throws the shammy leather against the scarlet wall.

“You p****, you lucky f*** p***. I detest you Colin McFarlane, I genuinely detest you.”

Hearing the click of the door key turning in the porch door, he runs from the kitchen, where he is preparing a super low calorie carrot cake (only 128 calories per slice).

He has just piped lard and almond paste mix deep into the heart of the sphere shaped concoction, pushing it with a spatula through the body of the cake.

Claire is at Utopia having a manicure, or so John Bennett thinks. In reality, she’s at the nearby Crowne Plaza, getting fucked silly by Greg, her personal trainer from Total Fitness.

He sees her blossoming frame coming into view through the frosted pane. She walks in, humming to the latest Lady Gaga track.

“Hello darling. Welcome home.”

She steps towards him and he embraces her. He sinks backward into the recess of the kitchen.

“Why are you so damp. Its not raining. Why would you be so damp? Your hair, look at it, saturated. Your skin is oily. What’s happened to you darling?”

He looks down at her attire. She’s wearing a tracksuit – a pink velour number hugging her body; accentuating the fat about her hips. If he didn’t have the carrot cake to finish off, he’d be peeling off that tracksuit, right here, right now.

He notices a logo on her chest that says “Booty”. He notices, with some distaste, that as she passes by him, a bag hanging from her shoulder, that this emblem is also emblazoned across the top of her ample backside.

She swallows deeply. He feels his larynx drop. A stab of pain slices as a stitch when you ran as a fat child.

“Where have you been?” he asks as calmly as the situation allows.

She has by now, left the hallway, where he is standing – like a lamppost frozen and livid, like a cup overflowing with rage.

She climbs the staircase, two steps at a time, still it appears, listening to an iPod that is strapped to a belt beneath her tracksuit; one of the earpieces dangling like a work of art by Damien Hirst.

She hears him but aims for the sanctuary of the bedroom without answering.

“I know you are there my darling. I know you can hear me.”

She disappears out of view and he hears her pushing the clasp on the lock of the en-suite bathroom. Inside, ignoring the muffled cries of “darling, why are you so damp” she plays with herself, ramming a Cadbury’s Double Decker headlong into her arsehole.

In the kitchen he kneads the cake mixture, adding another chunk of the lard/almond concoction that he keeps in a tin marked AMARETTO that he bought in Pizza Hut on one of their first dates.

“See how this helps with your fitness regime” he whispers as he smoothes the mixture onto a tray and places it into the oven, the rage, a tsunami crashing a tidal wave of despair over his brain.

At dinner, she talks about her mundane day, an hour in the hairdressers, two hours in the Spa, would you believe it, lunch with Lynda, her friend from her last job when she had to work.

She of course does not mention the 2 hours in the gymnasium, trying to offset the onslaught of the excess pounds that she has been gaining, despite the low fat diet and exercise regime that she has followed with a devout conviction.

Is it her thyroid? Is it her metabolism? Is it just the ageing process?

She knows he doesn’t like her going to the gymnasium. Men prying over her body. He has never said it in so many words but for someone who doesn’t even like her walking down the street where he knows what men are like with one thing in their rancid heads.

He of course, is not like them. He would never stare at a woman, chat one up in a bar. The only girlfriends he has had are the ex’s of people he knows and a failed effort on the Internet. And now her, his former secretary who she originally thought of as a sad little despot barking orders at people who ridiculed him over coffee in the staff room – Mr Frog they used to call him. Froggy Bennett, the Joke of the Office, the Jealous Kermit.

After her failed marriage and a desire for a child – she eventually agreed to go with him for a drink and then somehow, despite the protestations of her friends, the majority of who she now rarely saw, she agreed to marry him after a drunkard proposal following one of his rare nights out with his business partners, entertaining some client – part of the job he never liked, as it allowed her, the rare opportunity to go out with her friends.

And this was his biggest fear – the thought that she would go out into society and meet someone who would make her truly happy and would allow her to lead her life as she really wanted to live it.

And she knew this and he knew her existence was becoming more and more detached and she despised the fact that she coated everything with deceit and trivial betrayals over mundane daily acts: going to see Lynda (her only friend who would tolerate her failing to accept and indeed make invitations) going to the gym – going to her art classes.

All these activities that she gave up after she moved into his show house; dressed by his mother and sister in various shades of terracotta and sunset yellows, canvases from Athena – vases filled with painted twigs.

Now she has started trying to Live Again, but without telling him. That would not be worth it. Best to keep it to herself.

As she tucks into her low fat lasagne, she was thankful that he did not ask again why she returned home with damp hair.

She asked about his day and how the Court hearing had been. He told her that it had been adjourned pending psychologists reports but nevertheless he thinks his client will win custody of the children.

She concludes that that is good news. He just nods and monitors her facial movements, occasionally glancing out of the patio window at the beads of gravel that swirl in the bolts of the autumn breeze around the small oblong of the garden between the pots of the sea grass and maram that his mother must have moved to the front, when she was last here cleaning the house.

“She’s been going to the fucking gym – Fucking slag – No wonder I’m getting nowhere.”

The email response was swift.

“Well you need to knock that on the head straight away. You need to get a grip on this.”

“You think I don’t know that.”

“It’s like a runaway train. She’ll think she can do what she wants. Reduce her allowance, hide her cards. You need to re set the factory setting, if you’re asking me.”

Martin, the recipient of the email, has never met his Claire or indeed any other member of the Group. However, he pictures him as being a decent man – not unlike himself, a regular guy trying to do his best.

“Well why don’t you do something about it then” replies Martin, before closing Outlook and taking a look to see if anyone has accepted his invitations from people with the same name on Facebook. He would love to get to double figures. Once he does, he may even venture into the World of Twitter. One step at a time and all that. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

She weighs herself every three days. He has a memory feature installed in the scales that enables him to record her weight at these intervals. He gauges her dress size by the underwear that he buys her every fortnight.

Stagnation. No gain. No loss. He notices from where she walked across the bedroom – she is if anything toning slightly at the top of her legs.

He feels the nausea rising. He ladles more and more of the lard into the risotto that was loaded with cream with an added portion of crème fraiche.

She is in turn lying in a bath, berating her lack of progress despite two weeks of two hour gym sessions. She fucks herself with a sponge in the shape of a platypus before sticking the beak of a Donald Duck FM Radio to finish off.

Some Radio 4 afternoon play comes on as she ejaculates across the bathroom floor. As she wipes herself down, the news headlines, a massacre in Nevada at the new Batman film, an interview with Christian Bale, saying something cool and cryptic, the mother of the gun man, a goofy looking pre-teen, assuring us, he was a lovely, gentle boy.

That night, John Bennett at Archibalds with the three partners of the firm, their wives, their bank manager and a trainee. The wife of one of the partners questions why Claire never comes to these occasions. On his flip board of excuses, tonight she’s got lady problems, ‘you know how it is’ and this normally has the desired effect of taking the topic elsewhere: stock market fluctuations, the Arab Spring, Margot’s latest attempt to learn Cantonese, the friend of a friend who met Princess Anne as a service station off the M4, that awful Batman thing, whatever next… blah blah blah.

He tries to work out whether he could tolerate the looks from the bankers, the other partners, all looking at her – wanting to fuck her lovely brains out and whether this outweighs the risk of her having freedom to go out whilst he’s at the function.

He did mention this once to a friend who recommended he discussed it with an expert as it really wasn’t right. It was actually quite destructive. Impossible to lead a normal life. But hey, what does he know. He probably wanted to fuck her too. Everybody wants to fuck her. She’s so fucking marvellous.

He opts not to invite her; instead buying her a bottle of champagne and cooking her a rather fine lasagne and telling her to relax and watch the dvd she has bought her – the final series of Sex and the City, Footloose and Dirty Dancing.

“Goodbye darling. Enjoy your evening. The bath is just the right temperature. Like an ocean. A perfect ocean for my perfect baby.“

He scatters rose petals on the meniscus of the bath water and places the champagne bottle in the cooler that he perches on a stand besides the bath.

He pours a glass into a flute fashioned from cranberry glass.

He takes off her robe and watches her flesh sink into the foam. He spots a stretch mark he hasn’t seen before. Is this new? Or has he just not noticed it before? He surely must have noticed. Surely. Perhaps it is new. Maybe that new protein mixture he bought from www.bicepsforyou.com is taking shape. She certainly looks a little thicker around the tops of her legs.

“You have a lovely night sweetie. Be back about 12 o’clock. You know I will get away as soon as I can. I hate these banking functions. All so god damn phoney.”

She sinks her head beneath the water and raises her hand that emerges, topped with suds. She waves him farewell.

As she lies there, reading Fifty Shades of Grey, John Bennett is quaffing a very decently Chablis whilst mutely observing the assembled table.

There are minders, finders and grinders at all law firms. At his, Barry Adamson, the Senior Partner was the finder. Paul Franks was the minder and Anita Reynolds was a ruthless predator; a fearsome hybrid of all three.

John Bennett, despite being at the firm for longer than any of the lawyers, falls into the none of the above category.

An uncomfortable hour passes, the partners recounting how for a second year running he’s failed to hit his target, combined with a failure to bring in any new clients, culminating in an astonishing outburst where he suggested that Paul Franks’ expense account has been misappropriated.

He despised gatherings such as these. Social small talk was a skill he had never managed to understand. Navigating the waters of social interaction was something that had left John, on more than occasion, capsized, shipwrecked, taken down into the murky depths of social failure.

Being anything more than an average fee earner is something that he longed for, yet didn’t possess the ability to achieve.

As he watches the assembled diners eating drinking and exercising social finery, he stares into the foreground and imagines his fiancé lying on the sofa ingesting the box of continentals he had left on the coffee table.

1456 calories in the chocolate alone. She will be expanding at this very moment. How he wished he was not here. How he wished he was there, on the sofa, fat feeding his lovely Claire.

The social demise of some Balkan state he heard being debated. He would rather be watching Big Brother and documentaries about such mundane things.

And whilst he is telling Barry Adamson that if he doesn’t make partner next year, he will throw himself before a train, she is foraging through the tins of ingredients she has expunged from the secret cupboard inadvertently discovered.

Inside, she was perplexed at the jars of goose fat, the amaretto tin filled with a gooey paste, the recipe books – the protein mix with “A Guide to Weight Gain” printed on its lid, a list of email addresses and the word “VORDERMAN” written across the back of a business card.

She runs to his office, his laptop on a drawer in a bureau, a picture of John Bennett’s graduation, a photo of a nephew,

She pulls up the lid and keys in the letters “VORDERMAN”.

The desktop like a city at dawn twinkles into life, the icons appearing in perfect lines.

She double clicks on the Inbox icon and follows the email trail – the attachments of graphs and charts, photographs of Claire, from behind as she walks along the driveway, pencil marks around her arse and hips, measuring expansion, the hideous e mail ramblings between him and the other members of the Fat Feeders of Frodsham.

And as he is being lead awkwardly from the table to a waiting taxi, the young Bank Manager in tears following the question as to whether she prefers anal or vaginal – the Senior Partner telling the taxi driver to take him home, apologising profusely – the remaining partners attempting to placate the other diners – ordering liquors and explanations smoothing over and thinking about the terms of John Bennett’s employment contract.

And during this time, in the thirty minutes it takes for the taxi to make its way through the city – she is penning in her immaculate writing on one of business cards:

“ENJOY YOUR SHITTY LITTLE LIFE JOHN BENNETT– GO THROW YOURSELF UNDER THAT TRAIN. AND BY THE WAY – IT ISN’T NORMAL AND IT DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE – DON’T CALL ME”

She fills the car with her belongings and watches in her rear view mirror the cab pulling up and John Bennett makes his way out – stumbling up the drive, prodding the door with a key before crumpling in a heap in the hallway.

The next day, a dog walker finds a body alongside a rail track. He pulls from the breast pocket of the torso, a photograph of Claire at her best weight, in a lacy bra and suspenders, chocolate cake smeared across her breasts, a present for his fortieth birthday.

Some yards away, the dog, cocking up his leg to piss, all over the severed head of John Bennett, eyes looking upwards to the balls of the pissing dog and the purple black bruise of a sky, both grinning inanely.

Across town, at that precise moment, the rain slanting down, a storm crashing over the city, Claire Bennett comes as intensively as the thunder echoing across the valley, a Curly Wurly protruding from her love box, goose fat, smeared across her chest.