Fat Boy Swim (2 page)

That’s for starters, fatso.

Best wait a bit.

Let the others get changed.

After all, he wouldn’t be missed.

The PE block felt deserted as Jimmy entered. He allowed himself to relax a little.

Could have been worse, thought Jimmy. If it hadn’t been a Friday afternoon, Hamblin might have been tempted to repeat last year’s humiliation. Forcing Jimmy into the showers. Trying to compensate the rest of the team after Jimmy’s crucial own goal.

‘Everyone will sit quietly on the benches –
quietly,
I said, McCormack – until Kelly has showered and dressed. You’ll all be dismissed when he’s nice and clean for his mammy.’

A year on Jimmy still squirmed at the recollection. Having to shower naked. Whole team watching. Hearing their snorts and laughter over the running water. Maddo blowing up his cheeks. Victor slapping them flat with great farting noises that sent the other lads into hysterics.

‘Sir, Kelly needs all they showers on. He’s only wettin’ one of his bum cheeks.’

‘You missed a bit you canny see, fatso . . .’

‘I didnae know you got red-haired whales . . .’

‘Ah can see Kelly’s tinky-winky . . .’

‘Sir, this is putting me aff ma dinner . . .’

After the shower, the further indignity of having to towel off and dress. Then clamber into giant underpants, sweaty fingers fumbling to button the trousers and failing to so. Jimmy feeling the mass of his belly mash against the material.

Sticky.

Clumsy.

Hopeless.

Hamblin had leaned against the door of the changing room, tapping his whistle against his teeth in that annoying way of his. Whenever Jimmy glanced up he was trawling the reactions of the team with his hard blue eyes. Thin smile on his face.

Sorry about today, lads, but this’ll cheer you up.

Only when Jimmy was struggling with his shoelaces, all the blood rushing up to his head as he bent over, Maddo poking him in the backside and going
boingggg,
had Hamblin let the others go.

‘Show’s over lads.’

Anything but that today, decided Jimmy.

And he had timed it well. All that was left of the team was the muck they’d trailed in from the pitch for the cleaners. Clumps of slimy mud with bits of grass sticking out like sparse hair pockmarked the floor. Empty cans and plastic bottles, none of them upright, littered the benches. Dods of chewing gum stuck to the walls. And then there was the smell. The fug of deodorant catching Jimmy’s throat and irritating his chest couldn’t mask it. Nor could the tang of the putrid pink carbolic Hamblin insisted the boys lather up with in the showers. Even the sweet echoes of the hair gel the lads used to get their fringes spiked up like the singer from the well-cool band they all liked wasn’t camouflage enough.

What was the smell exactly? Earth, and sweat and dirt. A boy smell. A team smell. Shared activity. Belonging.

It was a smell that made Jimmy hungry.

Jimmy heard water running. He picked his way across the muddy floor to the showers. Sighed. One shower had been left on full, its jet angled just so to soak the clothes bundled underneath it. Jimmy’s school socks were wedged into the shower drain, blocking it so that several inches of scummy water swirled between Jimmy and the shower tap. In that water, among floating islands of hair-balls and discarded sticking plasters, sailed the contents of Jimmy’s schoolbag: textbooks, jotters, diary. And his shoes. The schoolbag itself dangled upside down from a high window ledge.

He was an expert by now, was Jimmy, at concentrating on the task in hand. That way he didn’t allow himself to dwell on reasons
why
things happened. You focused on the moment and when it had passed, you forgot about it. Moved on. Aunt Pol taught him that. Said it worked for her.

Jimmy used this technique today, stepping into the blocked shower still wearing his football boots, and trying – at least – to save the textbooks from more damage. The jotters had already begun to shred in his hands, but luckily they were the ones he’d finished with this year. Mum liked to keep them.

But the books . . .

Jimmy laid them on the benches, wondering if they would dry out. They were for fourth year English. Mrs Hughes had handed them out today for holiday reading:
Look after them, now.

His blazer was also for fourth year. And fifth. And sixth, gulped Jimmy, holding the dripping garment at arm’s length and turning off the shower. Less than a month old, specially made because of the size. No way would Mum be able to fork out for another.

Jimmy forced himself not to think about these problems. They belonged to the future. For now he had to deal with getting himself and his drenched belongings home. His travel pass, somewhere in his blazer pocket, was pulped beyond recognition.

Awkward in studs, wet bundle leaving a trail behind him, Jimmy began the long walk home. He kept his head down when he passed the staffroom, praying he was invisible.

But he didn’t slip past the staffroom unnoticed, although there was only one person left on such a fine Friday afternoon in June.

And GI Joe wasn’t a proper teacher anyway.

STARTERS

Chapter
3

Tablet

Fired up for bingo, Mum didn’t look twice at the sopping wet bundle that Jimmy dumped in the bath. However, she wasn’t so keen to get out that she failed to clock Jimmy wearing his football gear. She tailed him from drawer to cupboard to bedside cabinet as he rummaged for the inhaler he needed when his chest felt extra tight.

‘What you doing playing football in a heat wave, son? Look at the colour of your face. What d’you think that doctor’s letter’s for? And what’re you looking for? Those? That?’

‘This,’ gasped Jimmy, sucking gratefully on the inhaler.

Just leave me, Mum,
he wanted to blurt in her face.
Let me get sorted. Empty my bag. Football’s over till fourth year. No point thinking about it till then.

‘Going out?’ he asked her, as if he was daft. She went out every Friday. ‘Look at you all dressed up.’

She wasn’t, of course. All she’d done was remove her housecoat and run a comb through her hair.

‘Och, away,’ Mum smiled, primping at the attention. ‘Bingo down St Jude’s. Murder in this heat. Pol’ll be here straight from work. You’ll get something to eat?’

Halfway out of the front door, Mum hesitated.

‘You take it easy, son. You can’t overdo things like other folk.’

Bliss. Peace. Place to myself. Jimmy sighed, relaxing at last.

She meant well, Mum, but she was always fussing. Flapping around him like a nervous crow on amphetamines:
Don’t do this. Don’t do that.
You’d think he was a blinking invalid. Didn’t she get it by now?

He was just fat.

Lardy.

Ginormous.

Clinically obese . . .

‘Don’t start that again,’ Jimmy warned himself aloud, but it was tough. Soon as he got thinking about it, he had a fight on his hands to stop his mind from scrolling down the litany of names for fat that he’d been called over the years. Must be hundreds of them, maybe even thousands.

‘Just words. Ignore them. Switch off. Walk away,’ Aunt Pol had taught Jimmy many years ago, and to a certain extent, he had learned to follow her advice. He shrugged off insults.
Sticks and stones
and all that.

But inside, deep inside, it blooming hurt. Every time.

Inside, Jimmy didn’t feel like Smelly Kelly, Fat Boy Fat. Of course not. He was just – a teenager. Normal in every way. Apart from his size. His bedroom was a pit. His feet stank. He hated getting up on school mornings. If any of his classmates scratched away a layer or two of fat they’d find a teenage heart like theirs beating for Britney or Kylie or Pink or Shakira. If any of his classmates ever bothered to
talk
to him, instead of slagging him off, they’d find he was just as clued up as they were on films, on books, on telly, even on sport. And as for music . . .

Jimmy sighed. It was Friday night after all. Why dwell on things he couldn’t change?

He flicked through the growing tower of CDs he was constructing under Aunt Pol’s guidance. An edifice, she called it, combining the best of the old and new millennium.

‘Try this. Try that,’ she’d say.

Beatles at the foundation, naturally. Then Motown, soul, and glam, and blues, and ska, and punk, even country. A bit of everything, in fact. Not forgetting her Friday favourite: Abba.

How could Jimmy possibly dwell on the football fiasco or zero friend count when ‘Dancing Queen’ filled the flat? Aunt Pol’s tune. He could see her already, catching the song’s first jangling arpeggio from the bottom of the close, and dancing her way up three flights of stairs, arms waving above her head, lyrics tumbling from her big red mouth.

Just the thought of her, way over the top, grabbing Jimmy’s hands and birling him into the middle of the hall, was enough to delete all the misery of the afternoon. Aunt Pol always made Jimmy feel good. For a while at least.

* * *

Everything was under control in the kitchen. Jimmy had crushed garlic, zested a lime, added some of his basil-infused olive oil and roasted the past-it peppers lying in the fridge.

He was just rolling out the pasta for his home-made feta ravioli, singing, in a painful falsetto, a descant to the descending chorus of ‘The Winner Takes it All’ (his favourite Abba track, although he kept quiet about that), when he heard Aunt Pol’s familiar cry:

‘What
is
that smell?’

The ritual never changed. Jimmy knew, without turning to look, that Aunt Pol was in the flat. A flurry of her scent flowered the kitchen before she reached it herself. Joy. Mum treated her to a new spray every Christmas. Jimmy loved it. Loved it so much that he’d slip out into the hall while Aunt Pol was busy poking and tasting the contents of every pot and pan on the cooker to fill his lungs from her sweet slipstream. He’d take his time, moving Aunt Pol’s high heels from the front door where she always kicked them off, picking up her bag from where she always dropped it in her haste to see him. Then he’d serve up dinner. Aunt Pol’s reaction was part of the ritual, too.

‘This food is just . . . I mean it’s so . . .’

There was no need for Aunt Pol to struggle for an adjective to describe Jimmy’s efforts.

Divine would do.

He knew, as sure as he was a plab on the pitch and a joke in the gym, that he was a star in the firmament of the kitchen. Jimmy just knew. Always had. How to cook. Brilliantly. When to go easy on the butter. When to add an extra egg white. When to stop stirring a sauce. How long to beat a batter.

Tablet – which Jimmy made every Friday night – was his
pièce de résistance,
but
everything
he made tasted like ambrosia. Not Ambrosia Creamed Rice, but ambrosia: food of the gods.

Aunt Pol mopped her plate with a slice of Jimmy’s fennel bread. ‘Betcha,’ she said, ‘folk are sitting in poncy restaurants right now paying through the nose for grub that doesn’t come near what you make, Jim.’

She was the only person who ever called him that. Never Jimmy.

‘I’m not too full. I’m not bloated. Flavours were magic and here, you just
chucked
this together from stuff lying around.’

Aunt Pol always analysed Jimmy’s cooking. Only time she grew serious. Unless Jimmy was getting grief somewhere. Then she grew seriously serious.

When she discussed cooking with Jimmy, she did so with a mixture of admiration and incomprehension. Sometimes, Jimmy even thought she looked upset. As if she had something difficult to say, but choked her words back down.

‘Can’t believe you’ve been born with this talent,’ she’d say. ‘Certainly don’t get it from me.’

‘I’m good, amn’t I?’ Jimmy would reply, knowing that nothing gave him more pleasure than the sight of someone reduced to an inarticulate sigh because of his genius. Filled him better than any meal.

Made him feel right.

Made him feel happy.

Pity Jimmy’s gift had to be kept top secret by Mum and Aunt Pol. Well. He could understand, especially now he was older, why it was best that his genius remained undiscovered. What would folks say, after all, if they discovered that:

Big blob Kelly

Had one special talent.

And it involved food?

God’s sick joke that, sighed Jimmy, not for the first time.

Later, in the kitchen, pouring sugar into a pot to melt, Jimmy accepted it was probably best that people didn’t know what he could do with food. He’d hate anything to put him off the skill he loved.

Not that he was a flipping martyr either. He was sick of the tablet fiends crowding him at every school fundraiser, never thinking for a minute that he was responsible for the biggest money-spinner on the cake and candy stall.

The urge to blurt out his secret could be overwhelming, especially when he had to watch the very people who accused him of being a lardy guzzler, scoffing several bars of
his
tablet at once. Ripping off the cling-film with greedy hands. Drooling their compliments: ‘This stuff’s the work of a genius.’

But Jimmy had to bite his tongue and watch the faces of all those who loved to make his life a misery twinkle with delight as he

p – e – e – l – e – d

back – he always did it

r – e – a – l – l – y

slowly for maximum effect – the lid of each plastic tablet-crammed tub.

No wonder he was tempted, when mouths usually twisted into sour jeers were drooling in anticipation for one draught of the sugary buttery magic that he had concocted and cut into neat, more-ish squares, to shout:

‘
Oi
!
I made all this. I’m not totally useless, am I
?’

‘Not totally useless,’ Jimmy rasped aloud, the bitterness in his voice taking him by surprise. He shook his head clear of dark thoughts. Friday night, remember. He’d Aunt Pol to himself, Bowie on the CD, while his huge pot of tablet bubbled on the hob. He’d even sorted the soggy textbooks, having the brainwave of laying them out on the cooker using the dying heat from the oven and the low warmth radiating from the ring where his sugar was melting to dry them out. They’d be fine.