A Man Melting (12 page)

The first intake consisted of sixteen kids for an autumn half-term ‘Live-In Weight-loss Workshop’.

‘Like Santa’s workshop, but without the sweets,’ he told one of the parents.

The kids’ arrival meant the real work finally started for Sophie and the girls (he didn’t want to come off misogynistic, but that’s what they were calling themselves), and the cooks and cleaners from the nearby village of Cranlaw. But for Danny, the holiday had begun. All the pricing had been calculated, all the contractors paid; gas, power and telephone were on direct debit; and the website took the bookings, which Sophie oversaw anyway. All he had to do was dole out petty cash for an aloe vera plant in the kitchen and wait till it was time to pay wages again.

The only smudge on the holiday atmosphere was being woken before dawn every morning, first by Sophie, who crawled out of bed to begin her day of rescuing the youth of the British Isles from themselves, and then by the mini-earthquake of the campers star-jumping their way to A Better You in the courtyard.

He preferred to spend his time away from the camp. The truth was, he didn’t care for the kids. Their unconscionable
eating habits and ‘never say live’ attitudes. Or the staff. This was Sophie’s dream and he was her accountant gigolo.

His best friend, Sig, came to visit after the camp had been open a month. It was quiet. Only one dorm was being used because it was not school holidays anywhere within a three hundred mile radius. The only campers were high school dropouts or Critical Cases, though he wasn’t sure who made the ‘critical’ call: doctors, teachers or parents. Perhaps it was Sophie.

‘Sophie seems a lot taller,’ Sig said after he and Danny had completed a quick tour of the camp.

‘She’s tasted power.’

‘Ah, that’s what it is. Move over Mussolini.’

‘Come on, I’ll show you the loch.’

‘Och aye,’ his friend said in his worst Scottish accent.

The sight of the water coincided with the chill and roar of the wind as they stepped out of the sycamore and birch windbreak that surrounded the camp. Sig dug his hands into the depths of his coat pockets but Danny, wearing just an unironed business shirt, didn’t even goosebump.

‘Do you want to skip stones?’ he asked.

Sig looked at the dark green water.

‘I must warn you,’ Danny continued, ‘I’ve been practising. I once hit a duck on the twelfth bounce.’

‘You’re that busy?’

He shrugged and pulled two ladyfinger cigars from his shirt pocket. They were halfway between cigarettes and proper hard-boiled-detective cigars.

‘You smoke now?’

‘Just these. I’m learning to blow smoke rings. Wanna see?’

Sig was jiggling up and down on the spot to keep warm. ‘Can we maybe go back to the camp?’

He’d never shown anyone his smoke rings. Sophie had banned him from smoking at the camp — bad impression to send the campers and all. Even the most perfectly rounded, unbroken smoke ring felt bogus, hypothetical, without a witness. But he shrugged once more and they headed back.

Over lunch in the dining hall, surrounded by the trainers and the sprinkling of campers, Sig leant across the table and whispered to Danny, ‘You don’t eat this stuff all the time, do you?’

He looked down at his steamed vegetables and wild rice salad. He’d never had a problem with the food — at least he didn’t have to cook. It wasn’t the task of cooking he minded, it was deciding what to eat three times a day for the rest of your life. He raised his head, wearing a ’
fraid so
expression.

‘You don’t, y’know, microwave a pizza afterwards?’

‘If you’re still hungry, I’m sure there’s seconds.’

Sig pushed his plate forwards. ‘Nooo. I’m right. Might drive to the village, what’s it called —’

‘Cranlaw.’

‘Cranlaw, right. What sort of shops they have there?’

‘Your cough is getting worse,’ Sophie told him, six weeks into the camp’s operation.

‘It’s just the cold.’

‘It’s the bleeding cigarettes.’

‘Cigars.’

‘They are small cigars. I feel entitled to call them
cigarettes. They’re not good for you. The kids have seen you at the loch.’

‘So. It’s my hobby. I’m allowed a hobby, aren’t I?’

‘What about your novel?’

‘I like being outside.’

‘Take the laptop.’

‘But it’s stupid.’

‘I think it’ll be funny.’

‘It’s a young man’s idea.’

‘I feel bad. Like you don’t want to be here.’

‘I like the loch,’ he said.

‘Maybe you should spend more time with the kids. You’re the only man here. Some of these kids need a male role model.’

‘One that smokes cigars?’

She held out her little finger. ‘Just wee ones.’

He thought about his smoke rings. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘give me a kid. One kid. I’ll daddy him like there’s no tomorrow.’

The kid’s name was Barry. He was eleven years old and four feet tall but weighed fifteen and a half stone. He always wore a big orange FUBU hoodie, even while exercising. Sophie and the other counsellors had tried in vain to get him out of it. Now he was Danny’s project.

‘I like your shoes,’ Danny told him. They were old school Nikes. White with a purple swoosh.

‘Okay,’ Barry said, looking down. His head was shaven. A number two, Danny thought. Sophie hadn’t clippered his hair since they’d bought the camp. It was beginning to blow in his eyes down at the loch.

‘Do you want to get away from here for a while?’

At the loch, he suddenly felt bad about smoking in front of an eleven year old. He patted the ladyfingers in his shirt pocket and said instead, ‘Got any hobbies?’

‘Nah.’

‘Watch a bit of TV, I suppose?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Play a few computer games?’

‘Yeah.’

Danny picked up a stone and threw it sidearm out over the water. It bounced four times. ‘Not my best effort,’ he said. The kid stood there with his hands in the pockets of his orange hoodie, the blankest of expressions on his face.

‘Do you know much about classical Greece?’ Danny asked.

‘What?’

‘Lyric poets? Sappho of Lesbos?’

Barry snorted.

‘You’re right to laugh. That’s where the term “Lesbian” comes from. And “Sapphic”.’

Barry’s face was going red, but he was grinning, sort of.

‘It’s not certain whether Sappho was a lesbian in the modern sense, but her poems were quite sensual. I used to have a book of them a while back. When I was researching my novel.’

‘You wrote a book?’

‘No. Just researched it.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Sappho, sort of. There was a theory that she was like the headmistress of a finishing school, a
thiasos
, for the girls
of Lesbos. A place parents sent their daughters to become better marriage material.’

‘Like a fat camp?’

‘Um, maybe, but for hot, sexually curious girls.’

‘Awesome.’

‘Anyway, there’s some evidence that they used to have beauty competitions. Miss Lesbos 500BC, that sort of thing.’

‘Are you a historian or something?’

‘No. I am the director of finance.’

‘What?’

‘The camp’s accountant.’

‘Dumb.’

‘Yeah, well, back to Lesbos: the winner of the beauty contest got the best husband and the winning
thiasos
got the best reputation, so these contests would have been cut-throat affairs. That’s what my novel was going to be about. All the characters would be female and they would all be getting it on with each other, knowing that as soon as you get married, that’s it.’

‘Can I read it?’

‘I told you, pal, I never wrote it.’

‘There’s no internet here.’

‘You’re only eleven.’

‘Shut up.’

After two weeks, Danny had not succeeded in getting Barry out of his hoodie. He felt dodgy enough as it was — grown man and pubescent boy spending so much time alone, down by the loch, away from the other campers — without asking Barry to remove an item of clothing.

He had begun to wonder if it was just the one hoodie, or several identical ones which he changed when no one was around. To find out, one day at lunch he spilt low fat/low carb salad dressing over the front of Barry’s hoodie.

‘Oh, that’ll leave a stain.’

‘Arh.’ Barry ran, as best as he could, out of the dining room and appeared five minutes later with a big wet patch on the front of his hoodie. He could have changed hoodies and wet the fresh one, Danny thought. He checked Barry’s top every day from then on, but there was never any sign of a stain.

Barry stayed three weeks at Camp Grant in all, and lost half a stone — though Danny couldn’t tell, having never seen him without the hoodie.

‘Do you miss him?’ Sophie asked a couple of days after Barry had returned to school and his parents.

‘Who, Baz?’

‘Aw, you gave him a nickname.’

‘It’s not really a nickname. Chubby Checker is a nickname. Agent Orange is a nickname. Baz is just a shortened version of his name.’

‘I have another project for you if you’d like?’

‘Actually,’ he said, flipping open his cellphone, which had begun to vibrate in his pocket, ‘I’m quite busy with the numbers at the moment. Hello, Camp Grant, Danny speaking.’

And it was true, the numbers did need his attention. The camp had been in operation for a little over three months, but it wasn’t meeting any of his cash flow projections. The problem was that during the school term, there weren’t enough campers to cover the cost of the staff and all the
maintenance the camp needed. The peaks during holiday periods just weren’t earning enough to cover the losses in the troughs. He didn’t want to tell Sophie. He was the numbers man, and it was a numbers problem. He should have seen this coming.

‘Do you ever think you’re too good?’ he asked as they lay in bed one night.

‘Huh?’

‘Kids come here, they lose some weight, learn life skills to keep it off, and never come back.’

‘Are you saying we shouldn’t help these kids?’

‘As a business —’ he said, but stopped.

‘We’re doing okay, aren’t we? The next run of holidays are coming up soon.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. We won’t run out of fat kids for a long time.’

‘Sad but true.’

The next day he printed out vouchers to hand to all the campers returning home:

Recommend Camp Grant to your friends and go into the draw to win a PS3.

He didn’t show Sophie in case she disapproved of a) endorsing the video games that had led the children away from exercising in the first place, or b) the fact there was no PS3 to give away.

Life at the camp settled into a routine. The meals, which he hadn’t minded at first, began to grate with every reappearance. He saw the screwed-up faces of the new
arrivals when presented with a grilled chicken salad and thought, ‘Try eating this every seven days for the rest of your life.’

Then there was the weekly counselling of the counsellors. Another phantom rodent in Holly’s room; Amanda looking for someone to bad-mouth the others to; Emily to regale her weekend exploits one last time.

And though everything was repeating with an uncomforting familiarity, he couldn’t find anywhere to shave a few extra pounds off expenses or squeeze more revenue out of the camp to push it into the black.

Then one day Sophie burst into his office, which was just their cabin’s second bedroom, though it had external access via a pair of rickety sliding doors. ‘Good news, Sour Chops,’ she said. ‘Barry got expelled from school.’

‘Good news?’

‘He’s coming to the camp till they find him a new school.’

‘I’m snowed under at the moment.’

‘He asked to come back here, Danny. You mean something to him.’

‘What’d he do? To get suspended?’

‘Expelled. His mother didn’t say.’

He was drafting an email to ITV, suggesting they film a reality show at the camp, when Sophie brought Barry into his office.

‘Here he is. Danny, say hi to your long-lost friend.’

He was, naturally, wearing the orange hoodie.

‘So, Barry, what’d you do?’

‘What?’

‘To get expelled.’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted,’ Sophie said.

When she had left, he rolled his chair closer to Barry and asked, ‘What’d you weigh in at this morning?’

‘Fifteen. And a half.’

‘You put it back on?’

‘So?’

‘Hey, I wish they were all like you. We need all the campers we can get.’

Barry looked down at his shoes. They looked new. Black Reebok high-tops. Basketball shoes for kids who don’t play basketball.

The next day they were sitting on a log they had dragged from the forest onto the shingle beach.

‘So, why’d you get expelled?’

Barry just shook his head.

‘What’s that? You missed me?’

‘Shut up.’

‘If I shut up, it’s gonna be pretty quiet out here.’

‘Good.’

‘Fine,’ he said, and folded his arms, only pretending to be in a huff.

They sat on the log — their log — both staring out to the island in the middle of the loch.

‘I wonder what sort of trees those are,’ Danny said, meaning the trees on the island. He counted eight of them, two rows of four, their trunks straight as pillars.

Barry repositioned himself on the log. ‘I could go a Kit Kat.’

‘It’ll cost you,’ he said without thinking. The sort of office banter he’d had with Karen — which he had now decided was not flirting, though she may have believed it to be.

‘How much?’ Barry asked.

‘For what?’

‘A Kit Kat. You could buy me one.’

Danny stood up. ‘Oh, that’s evil!’

‘What?’

‘Barry, I think we just saved Camp Grant. Our souls? Well, they’re another matter.’

Two weeks later, they were sitting on the same log. Barry was still waiting for a new school to take him on, still fifteen and a half stone, still wearing his hoodie, but all the counsellors had noticed a change in him.

‘He really seems to be engaging with the others,’ Sophie had reported. ‘I think you’re finally getting through to him.’