FAT

Mike Walker was FAT, with a capital F, a capital A and a capital T. In fact, he wasn’t just fat, he was obese. Morbidly obese, Dr. Kurfieta had said.

His wife, Jayne, said he looked like a cross between an elephant and a redneck pick-up truck with a bad paint job. She’s shown him a photo of the psychrolutes marcidus – the blobfish – which she’d found online and which she said looked like he used to, when he was a little thinner. They’d switched from missionary to doggy style four years ago, but time and food had continued along on their inexorable march and it’s hard for a woman to get aroused after she’s wiped a man’s arse and held his penis whilst he pissed into a plastic bucket.

His daughter, Lucy, just said he looked like Shrek, and somehow that hurt him even more. She didn’t speak to her father much, despite living under the same roof as him, because his room smelled like death and he never left it. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to – he’d grown too large for his record-breaking bulk to sustain his weight or to fit through the doorframe. When she did speak to him, it was to ask him to override her mother if she’d asked for a new bike and Jayne had said no.

Her mother always let Mike get his way in the end, even when it came to food, which is why he was so fat in the first place.

It was so bad that Jayne Walker had almost given up hope. The initial onslaught of doctors and dietitians had slowed to a trickle of specialist nutritionists and physiotherapists. Jayne had even asked a priest to bless the house, but spirits or no spirits, Mike wasn’t about to start losing weight any time soon.

He ate what he wanted when he wanted it, and the most exercise he ever got was when he rolled over in his reinforced bed to put his plate down. In many ways it was no surprise that Mike was a big, fat bastard.

And the worst thing of all was that Mike was a genuinely nice guy. Sure, he’d never exactly been popular, nor the kind of guy who had a lot of friends, but he did hold on tight to the friends that he had. He called his mother every day, loved his family, never raised his voice in anger and had no other vices, except for his love of fatty foods. Not that the press – and particularly the tabloid press – had cared. To them, Mike Walker was just a headline: Morbidly Obese Father Costs Taxpayers Millions.

And so he hadn’t been particularly excited about meeting Dr. Kufieta. “Just another useless old man with a PhD,” he’d said to Jayne, when she’d first told him about the appointment. “It won’t do me any good.”

And then he’d been surprised when Dr. Kufieta arrived; he was white, for a start, and he was almost young enough to be Mike’s son. He wore khaki shorts and a white polo neck, and he drove a Peugeot 306. He wore wax in his hair and smelled faintly of Lynx Africa. In short, Mike Walker had dismissed the man before he even spoke to him.

Dr. Kufieta had started with the usual stuff. “If you don’t change your lifestyle within six months, you’ll die,” he’d said. “I can only help you so much, if you want to make a real change, you’re going to need to help me out here,” he’d said. “You’re too big to operate on,” he’d said. “We can’t get you out of the door, we can’t rig an ambulance that could carry you, and we don’t have a big enough bed to take you if you make it to the hospital without having a heart attack along the way.”

Mike had fumed on the inside, but he’d successfully hidden his disappointment behind several hundred pounds of skin and cartilage.

Dr. Kufieta had given him a slap on the wrists and a new diet plan, as well as his personal mobile phone number and a promise that he’d make Mike better, whatever it took. Mike was sceptical; he’d heard it all before, and the good doctor’s diet routine wasn’t new to him. He shared it with Jayne and thought nothing more of it.

The doctor shook his head and then disappeared for a quick word with Mike’s wife before climbing into his 306 and driving away. That night, Mike’s dinner was a thick vegetable stew, made with carrots, potatoes, onion, cabbage, lentils and plenty of salt and pepper. The doctor had allowed him two slices of wholemeal bread to go with it; the ultimate goal was a diet of green vegetable smoothies, supplemented with fresh fruit and the occasional grain as a treat. Strictly no meat, and no fish for the first 60 days. This stew was meant to ease him in, for fear that the sudden change might kill him. A secret, dark part of Mike Walker – the part that regretted his early marriage and that thought his daughter would be better off without him – hoped that it would.

But on that first night, he ate it, and he continued to follow the doctor’s plan the following day when his wife was at work, busting her metaphorical balls to earn enough money to put food on the table in the first place. Lucy was at school, and so the house was empty; luckily, they’d been thoughtful enough to place a blender on his bedside table, along with a colourful assortment of fruits and vegetables, from apples and pears to spinach and kale, as well as grains and legumes, like quinoa and soybeans. Mike thought it looked like an explosion in a hipster’s pantry, but he tried his best to devour it. At first, he did just what the doctor ordered, blending the ingredients together and drinking the resultant goop. It came out thick, with little chunks in it, no matter how hard he revved up the blender. It needed a little water, but Mike only had a two litre bottle of water to keep him going until the family got home, and he’d learned early on how important it was not to waste it. He tried the blender again without much success, before resulting to shovelling raw spinach into his mouth by the handful.

Later that night, his wife cooked up a ‘treat’; sweet potato salad – his daily allowance of carbohydrates – on a bed of rocket, along with home-made lemon sorbet – sugar-free, of course – as a dessert. It cleansed his pallet, but it didn’t chase away the gnawing hunger he felt, like a wild animal that was trapped beneath his ribcage.

He cried himself to sleep that night, and then slept so loudly that he didn’t hear Jayne and Lucy on the school run.

The only thing that kept him going the following day was the fact that it was Friday. He spent the morning staring mournfully at the blender, and he spent the afternoon staring mournfully at the fruit. At around 1:25 PM, he picked up a plum and threw it at the wall; it exploded, and the stone went skittering across into the living room, where Cookie, the family cat, tried to gobble it up. He choked on it and spat it back out, then cast a desultory look at Dave, who was lying on his bed like a beached whale or an elephant with a spear in its side, and staring straight back at him.

“Rather you than me, buddy,” he mumbled.

When Jayne got home he played the last card left to him – the sympathy card. “I’m starving here, Jayne,” he’d said. “Don’t you see? What the hell will it take for you to see that you’re killing me with this shit?” Here, he’d pointed at the bowl of fresh fruit and vegetables that she’d tried to poison him with.

“Don’t you want to lose weight?” she’d replied. “Don’t you want to stick around to watch your daughter grow up? To see her first school play? To scare the hell out of whoever’s unlucky enough to come to pick her up on prom night? To wave her off when she goes to university?”

But Mike was having none of it. “I can’t eat this,” he whined. “Please. I’ll try again after the weekend, I promise. You’re right, you’re always right. I can’t keep on living like this. But it’s Friday night, I’m starving, and I need something to eat. One proper meal won’t kill me, but it might just keep me alive.”

And so she’d relented, and she’d picked up a little pork and made him a kebab to go with the chips she’d grabbed with her Mr. Cod loyalty card. The old man in the chip shop had grinned his toothless grin at her, then asked her how Mike’s diet was going.

“Fine, thanks,” she’d said, abruptly. She bought him an extra pickled egg, just to prove a point.

Mike ate well that evening, and he slept badly that night. He had a weird dream about someone watching him sleep, and when he woke up he felt too self-conscious to go to sleep again. It was at times like this that he wished he still shared a bed with his wife; if anyone could scare the nightmares away, she could.

Mike tried again on Monday, but the truth was, he just loved meat. Maybe not the kind of pork you could pick up from a decent butcher, though; Mike liked the gizzards you got in a KFC bargain bucket, the deep-fried whatever-it-was in a McDonald’s chicken nugget. He tried and he tried and he tried, but he caved by Tuesday morning and by Wednesday, he was back to his old bad habits.

Dr. Kufieta paid him another visit the following week. He didn’t look happy. This time, he spoke to Jayne while Mike was in the room, watching impassively whilst his future was decided for him.

“It simply can’t go on like this,” Dr. Kufieta explained.

He took a long pause and a deep, sharp intake of breath before continuing. At last, he spoke. “If that’s your decision,” he said at last. “Then that’s your decision. It’s the wrong decision, but it’s a decision.”

Mike Walker grunted, and Dr. Kufieta took that as his sign to leave. “I never forget a patient,” he said. “And I’ll never forget you either, Mr. Walker.”

Jayne led the young doctor outside, and shook his hand one last time before he climbed behind the wheel of his Peugeot. “Please, Dr. Kufieta,” she’d begged. “Don’t give up. I’m tired of people giving up on us. I’m tired of Mike giving up. Please tell me that you’ll get us out of this mess.”

Dr. Kufieta looked at her, and he looked away again just as quickly. “I’ll do what I can,” he’d said. And then he was gone, just like that.

That night, Mike Walker slept terribly; he’d had that dream again, that godawful dream that just kept on coming. That dream where someone – or something – was watching him. He drowned his sorrows in sugar-free Coca Cola.

Dr. Kufieta didn’t come again, and Mike and Jayne quickly fell back into their old bad habits. Mike didn’t drink, but if he was a drinker then he would’ve been knocking back the bourbons and shotting vodka from the bottle. But Mike Walker didn’t drink, so he ate instead. He ate and ate and ate.

The dreams got worse and worse. At first, it was just a fragment of an illusion that he thought he’d thought; then, it became a living nightmare, something he could never escape no matter how much his wasted body wanted him to. It was always the same dream, and it was always something alien, a strange face he’d never seen before, something lucid and rancid, something so terrible that he wondered what the hell it was supposed to be in the first place.

All of Mike’s dreams were the same; they revolved around the same disturbing premise, where some unidentified alien guy seemed to break unashamedly into his room and start staring at him, until he caved and started screaming.

The alien had a green face and green skin, green legs and green arms, and green appendages which seemed to slobber green slime over the chunks of bony flesh that he’d been unable to swallow. Plus it had massive legs and a ginormous brain, separated into sections and ready to kick ass with its sharp teeth and devastating claws.

And worst of all was the way that it just stood there and looked at him, like it was sizing him up and figuring out which part of him would be the tastiest. For a humongous extra-terrestrial life-form, Mike made the perfect meal; sure, the meat was a little fat-heavy, but Mike’s bloated organs would be considered quite the delicacy on Altair-4, wherever the hell that was.

It wasn’t until the sixth night in a row that Mike realised he wasn’t dreaming. He realised this because he pissed himself, and the warm, seeping liquid failed to wake him up. He paused for a second, deep in stunned thought, and then the realisation hit him and he screamed the kind of primal scream that chills your bones and sets off nearby dogs and car alarms. A light clicked on somewhere, and Mike blinked and rubbed the crust from his eyes. When he moved his head away again, his nocturnal visitor was nowhere to be seen.

Thirty seconds later, the light clicked on in Mike’s bedroom and Jayne came barrelling through the doorway.

“What is it, sweetheart?” she asked, dampening a cloth and using it to mop sweat from Mike’s glistening brow.

“I saw something,” Mike muttered, hoarsely. “Something green and evil, with big teeth and weird tentacles. It was watching me.”

“Oh, honey, it was just a dream. Try to go back to sleep – you’ll feel better in the morning.”

Mike continued to protest, but it was 3:17 in the morning and his wife was having none of it. “Stop being stupid,” Jayne had told him. “Aliens don’t exist, and even if they did, I think they’d have better things to do than watch you sleep.”

“But-”

“But nothing, Mike. I’m going back to bed. Some of us have to work in the morning.”

Mike didn’t get much sleep that night, but the strange apparition stayed away. He was relieved when the sun finally rose and cast its first rays of light over the horizon and into the dusty room that he’d been trapped inside for the last five years. After the night of drama, he didn’t feel much like eating; for the first time in a long, long time, Mike had lost his appetite.

He slept a little throughout the day and tried to make it up to his wife that evening by earing the steamed vegetables she’d prepared for him without complaint. After all, he reasoned, perhaps it was something he ate. He’d heard that cheese could give you vivid dreams, but the green demon he’d seen took it to a whole new level. So he promised himself he’d try to stick to the healthy stuff.

But that night, the visitor was back again, and Mike was left with a sense of déjà vu. He called for his wife again, she came barrelling into the room like a runaway train again, and this time, Mike kept his tired eyes open for long enough to watch the alien climb out of his bedroom window. It was just a short drop from his ground-floor hovel to the rose garden outside, and when Jayne refused to listen to her husband’s impassioned plea for her to protect him from the visitor, he tried a different tack.

“Go out and check for footprints, then,” he whined. “If you don’t believe me, go and see for yourself.”

Jayne grumbled reluctantly, but she did what her husband asked of her. She was gone for nearly ten minutes, and Mike could tell that she was looking around out there by the way that the beam of her flashlight swept around outside the window, casting strange shadows inside the room.

“There’s nothing there,” she told him, when she wandered back inside with her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her shoulders. “Go back to sleep, I’ve had enough of this nonsense.”

The following night, the visitors came back again. When Mike called for his wife, she didn’t come to him, but he was sure as hell that he heard him. He shouted until his throat was hoarse, but the weird being just continued to watch him impassively; eventually, he gave into sheer exhaustion and fell asleep. When he woke up, the visitor was gone.

Life continued. Over the next six months, the pattern repeated itself; Mike was eating better but sleeping terrible, and every night the unwelcome guest appeared in his room, as if by magic. Mike never saw him arrive, and he never saw him leave again, but sometimes he felt a chill in the air and he assumed – correctly – that it was his window sliding open and closed. Every night, he called for his wife, and every night, she ignored him. He tried the police, but they ignored him. He tried a priest, but she ignored him. He tried a wide range of independent ‘experts’ on alien abductions, but they couldn’t afford to come out to see him.

One night, he tried his daughter, but she ignored him too. “I’m scared, daddy,” she said. “Mummy says you’ve gone crazy.”

“Your mother said that?”

“She says you’re just telling stories and that the men in white coats are going to take you away.”

“It’s not the men in white coats I’m worried about,” Mike said. “You have to believe me, sweetheart.”

But Lucy didn’t believe him, and she started to cry. Then, she stuck a thumb in her mouth and scuttled away to climb into bed with her mother, who wasn’t too pleased to be woken up in the middle of the night by her snotty-nosed daughter, who was supposed to be sound asleep in her own bed. It was, after all, a school night, and she could tell by the fuzzy quality of the half-light that dawn was on its way.

When Mike’s visitor came back again that evening, and when he called for his wife to help him, he didn’t expect her to respond. But she did; by the time that she made it through to Mike’s room, the alien had disappeared again, but Mike’s eyes were still full of terror. Jayne’s eyes were simply full of fury.

“God damn it, Mike,” she shouted. “I’m sick to death of this rubbish.”

“But-” he stammered.

“We’ll go and stay with my mother, at least for now. Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? What you’re doing to your daughter?”

“But how am I supposed to look after myself?”

“You’ll have to figure something out,” Jayne snapped. “I mean it, Mike. Use that vivid imagination of yours.”

And with that, she turned on her heel and walked out of the room. He could hear clangs and thuds from the rest of the house, followed by the disoriented voice of his daughter. Then the front door opened and closed and he heard a screech of rubber and the crunching of gravel as a car drove away. He looked at the red LEDs on the clock on his bedside table; it was 3:17 AM, and his wife had left him alone in the dark. His daughter had gone without even saying goodbye.

All through the following day, he lived in hope. His ears picked up on every little sound, and he expected his wife to walk back in at any time, to beg for forgiveness and to sit with him through the night until the alien reappeared and he could prove to her that he wasn’t making it up. But Jayne didn’t come, and later that night, when the apparition paid him one final visit, he lost his temper.

“What do you want from me?” Mike screamed. The visitor didn’t reply; it just continued to stare at him impassively. “You’ve ruined my life. My wife left me because of you, you overgrown alien turd muncher. So go on then, do it. Let’s end it, let’s get it over with. Put me out of my misery. Do it, damn you. Do it!”

But the alien did nothing of the sort, and so Mike took matters into his own hands. He rocked back and forth in the reinforced bed, rejigged his massive haunches and slowly swung one of his legs off the mattress and on to the floor. Then, he pushed himself up, slowly at first, and then with a little more confidence. He swung his other foot onto the floor and set it down with a hollow thud. He was sitting up unsupported, for the first time in four years, and boy, did it feel good. And he wasn’t finished.

Mike used his massive hands to support himself on the reinforced bed, and slowly pushed off until he was standing upright. It hurt, and it set his heart racing and left him short of breath, but to his amazement, he didn’t fall back down.

The visitor smiled, exposing a mouth full of misshapen fangs that were stained a mottled brain. It waved slowly at Mike, a movement he could only half make out in the darkness of the room. Then it opened the window, climbed carefully out into the garden, and was gone.

Mike Walker took another tentative step, followed by another and then another, until he’d made it through his bedroom door and into the hallway. He rested against the wall for a moment to catch his breath, and then hobbled over to the coat stand, where he found his old walking stick. It fit into the palm of his hand like an old friend, and it took just enough of his weight for him to slowly let himself out through the front door and out into the cool night air.

He started out along the quiet suburban street, keeping his eyes peeled for passing cars. He stuck his thumb out at the first one he saw, but the driver ignored him. The second one drove past a couple of minutes later, slowed down as it approached him, and then sped off when they saw how big he was. But the third car, a Peugeot 306, slowed to a stop and let him in.

Mike didn’t notice that it was Dr. Kufieta in the driving seat until after he’d somehow managed to squeeze himself into the back of the vehicle. The good doctor had to tilt the passenger seat as far forward as it would go, and Mike was reminded of how the psychrolutes marcidus would look if it was squished into a goldfish bowl. He was trying to remove a seatbelt from his sizeable ass crack when he realised it was Kufieta behind the steering wheel.

The doctor asked him where he wanted to go, and Mike gave him his wife’s parents’ address before launching into a long explanation of what had happened since the two men last saw each other. Kufieta listened politely and drove with both hands on the steering wheel. When Mike was finished, the doctor had nothing to say except, “Remarkable.”

Kufieta dropped Mike off at his destination, and watched from the driver’s seat as he hobbled his way over to the front door. The house was dark to begin with, but when Mike rang the doorbell, it erupted in a flurry of light. It was Jayne who answered the door, dressed for bed in a black dressing gown. She took one look at her husband, who was still standing and putting so much weight on his walking stick that it looked ready to break.

Jayne wrapped her husband in a hug – at least, she wrapped up as much of him as she could manage – and squeezed him tight, then stepped aside so he could enter the house. Dr. Kufieta watched him go and smiled.

He drove home in silence, deep in thought as he cruised beneath the streetlights. When he finally got home, he treated himself to a rare glass of whiskey and updated Mike’s case file. Then he went back to his car, popped the trunk, and removed his alien costume. He folded it up gently and placed it at the back of his wardrobe, then gingerly laid the mask on top of it. He hoped he’d never have to use it again.

Dr. Kufieta slept soundly that night, as he always did. And when the sun rose on a new day, he climbed back into the Peugeot 306 and drove to the clinic. He had more lives to save.

THE END