Disappearing Act

by Jenny Love

‘Lardy-McHardy, Lardy McHardy’.  The walk home from school was always filled with their taunting faces.  They danced around me singing that awful name.  I’d get home, my clothes torn from the pulling and the groping.  I’d fix on my good Sammi smile.  Good Sammi doesn’t cry or get upset.  Mum loves good Sammi most of all and when I’m good she gives me a treat.  The ice-cream soothes my embarrassment about my size.  It’s coolness calms the red blush in my cheeks.  Bad Sammi plots in my head to get revenge one day.  Bad Sammi dreams of sitting on those girls until their faces turn blue.
             At night I’d dream of boys and men who might change my name.  Simon le Bon was out as he only married skinny models but maybe George Michael would want me?  It would be years before I’d realise why you never saw him with a stick insect draped around his arm.  Bad Sammi reminded me that puppy fat made me a dog. To shut her up at the school discos, I’d hide in the corner with crisps and coke.  Bad Sammi can’t talk when her mouth is full.
             University came and I carried on growing out not up.  I made new friends.  The ones who covered their faces with long fringes to hide petrified shyness.  The ones who wore glasses at school.  The ginger ones.  We’d go out to the union and I was always Fat Sam.  The good samaritan who made people smile. I’d win the drinking contests and play my part as witty bait when we’d go out on the pull.  The young men of the university would laugh at my jokes and say, ‘You’ve got a pretty face’ to my face. 
             (’For a fat bird’, they said to my wide behind as they reached round my girth to ask one of my thin friend’s for her phone number). 
             Late at night, in the halls, I’d wrap these hurts in bandages made from cheese-sauce-smothered-lasagne with extra chips.
             Twenty stone at graduation.  Bad Sammi told me I looked like a giant dustbin in my robe. 
             Growing on to a sensible job in a bank.  The work experience girl would fetch french fancies in the afternoon.  I’d refuse and then secretly eat the Minstrels and Rolos hidden in my desk drawer.  Men took me for drinks and spent the night probing me for advice on how to get Tracy from accounts to take an interest in them.  Bad Sammi told me they were only out for one thing anyway.  I’d had a lucky escape. 
             My flat had a double bed for one.  At twenty-two stone there wasn’t room for anyone else.  My fridge was my bedtime companion, my entertainer, my lover.  Madeira cake, cut into thin slices, melted marvellously in my mouth.  The sweet, sensuality of the cherry, on my tongue, not yet broken.
             My clothes continued to shrink in the wash.  I joined Weight Watchers and did indeed watch, in delight as my weight tumbled down to twenty-one stone three, only to refill my  broken heart with lashings of cream and giant packets of crisps.  The dismay as I watched it climb back up the scales to twenty-three stone four.  At this point I could no longer fit pretty shoes.
               At thirty my friends from the bank held a party.  They cheered at me to get up on the dance floor with them.  I broke into a sweat as my body wobbled to the music.  Good Sammi laughed and threw back her head.  Bad Sammi reminded her not to bend back too far. 
             ‘You might fall over and not get back up again.’ 
             My bosom heaving,  I was getting out of breath just shaking my voluptuous ass.  I tried to perch at the bar on a stool.  I wouldn’t risk the chairs with arms for fear I might not get back out. 
             I missed my cousin’s wedding in the States as I was unable to afford price of two seats return. 
             One Monday morning I  struggled to put on my bank uniform of blouse and skirt (specially made by a firm in Derbyshire, the extra cost deducted from my pay cheque).  My tights and overwide shoes strained at the seams.  At lunchtime that day I felt quite faint.  At 2.35 I stood up to shake the hand of a new customer and felt the world turn into a vision of pins and needles before I was blinded by a hot white flash.
             I came round staring up at the ceiling, the fluorescent light was hot on my face.  People peered down at me and told me not to worry, the ambulance was coming. 
             The paramedics were very kind.  Their green uniforms blurred in and out and I heard them huff and puff, pulling at my shoulders and asking me gently if I thought I could sit up.  I thought,
             ‘No, I don’t think I can.’ 
             Bad Sammi smiled and good Sammi worried.
             I heard them on their walkie talkies asking for the fire brigade.  I heard Mr Burton, the manager tell Janie the clerk to,
             ‘Get these people out and shut the doors.’ 
             She said there was a crowd on the street, peering in through the windows and  asked if she should call the police. 
             Now I understood and silently wished my too-heavy body could just sink somehow into the rough blue carpet.  My blouse had slipped up during my fall and I felt the coldness of the air conditioning against the huge whiteness of my trunk.  But my face still felt hot.  Bad Sammi wanted ice-cream or she was going to start shouting obscenities.
             The fire brigade arrived and with the same precision they use to turn over smashed up Volvos, they bundled me onto a large tarpaulin.  It took six of them to carry  me on, this makeshift stretcher, out to the ambulance.  The crowd outside fell silent as we made our public appearance.  I was blinded once more the flash of a camera, and Bad Sammi told me that the paperazzi had arrived; I should smile.  Good Sammi didn’t want to smile. 
              I whizzed to hospital in a blaze of blue lights and sirens, lying prostrate on the ambulance floor.  There are no double beds in an ambulance.
That was six years ago.  I weighed twenty-five stone and two pounds.  At the hospital they gave me two options.  Lose the weight or not reach thirty-five. 
             They operated and gave me a gastric band.  My stomach began to shrink like an overwashed T-shirt.  A couple of teaspoonfuls of food left me feeling stuffed and so my body began to eat itself.  It took what it could from my vast reserves.  The fat started melting away.  Bad Sammi had tantrums and cried out loud, her hunger pangs no longer soothed by huge portions of pasta and double helpings of pudding. 
             Good Sammi said, ‘Well done.  Boys will like you now.’ 
             Bad Sammi raged.  ‘There’s more to life than boys!’
            
In six years I’ve lost twelve stone.  This has made Good Sammi extraordinarily happy.  Good Sammi smiles.  People like you more when you smile.  They don’t want you to cry or complain. 
             I met a man who tells me he loves me. There is space now for me to share my bed.  Sometime he goes away for days at a time.  Once I found a text message from a woman on his phone but he tells me I shouldn’t make a fuss.  Good Sammi tells me I should be grateful he’s around.
             I’ve lost almost half of my previous body weight.  Like a whole other person  just disappeared.    
             But sometimes I wonder…
             Where did she go?

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~ This piece was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 and was filed under Blog, Writing, Featured. You can make comments on it below. ~