chapter 3

I had to miss a week. All I had on Monday was a piece of toast and one tentative spoonful of noodles, then on Tuesday I ate nothing all day. I fainted Wednesday morning at work and had to book an appointment with a doctor. He prescribed some appetite stimulants but when I got home I put them in my cupboard and didn’t touch them again. I was afraid of what would happen. I slept a lot. I slept through the next portrait drawing session, too. When I woke up, it was late afternoon and I still felt tired. I had to start fixing this.

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Which made fourteen days until I next attended. I tried taking the pills for a few nights. By day two, I managed to eat something for lunch. Day three I managed a small lunch and dinner, but got complacent with the achievement, and lapsed.

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The idea of being fat scared me. People knowing that I was fat. Seeing it. Undeniably visible. It had strange qualities. Fat. Your skin changed. You became soft. Everyone stared at parts of your body you never thought of before. And they said things about you. Not that they mattered, in the grand and existential mess of confused morals and bad decisions which you and I have been born into. It’s just that I couldn’t see it happening. Ever.

I attended next week’s session having just managed to swallow a piece of toast without much on it. The doctor told me that the longer I starve, the smaller my stomach gets, putting me into a catch-22 where I feel like I’ve overeaten even though I haven’t.

I was laying my selection of pencils carefully out on their tray when she came in, a milkshake in hand. I heard her slurp up the last of it, then put it on the ground next to the railing and remove her clothes. Her stomach looked round as she turned and made her way towards the circle of easels. She came closer, and I could see her belly was shaking a little as she walked, stepping up onto the platform and sitting down in the same pose, head turned to look down at the floor in front of me with that neutral, long-sighted gaze. There was a rustle as everybody grabbed their pencils and began to work.

But I sat there feeling, against my own will, outdone and pathetic. It was one thing for me to confess, in my own mind and to my own conscience, that she had been gaining weight, but it was another to watch her ascend from the swamp of self-made neglect in which my feet were still making sucking sounds at the bottom, too weak to drag from the slop. In fourteen days, she’d gained enough weight for her belly to shadow her lap without touching it. In fourteen days, I’d eaten four meals and counted ribs in the mirror.

Raw with shame and embarrassment, and guilty for my annoyance, I spent half the session erasing and redrawing lines. The underside of her stomach curved in to meet her thighs, now, and I had to redraw the top of them a little further up to imitate their extra layer of width. Her breasts needed to be retraced one degree lower, their points slightly further forward. Then her thin bra straps were also creating small divots under her back. I added them in. I had to do the same for her underwear. Then the curl where her bottom met the platform had to be shifted backwards, ever since that curved section of outlining was gaining a small steepness as her smidge of softness pressed against the seat.

I hadn’t even started on her face. The pointiness of her nose looked funny against the round characteristics of her belly, at odds with it. Her body was pointy enough to match it, not long ago. I peered up at her to see if anything about her face might have changed, but there was no way to tell, since I had nothing to compare it to. It still looked the same.

I didn’t get any shading done that day.

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Another week went by and I managed to take a few more pills, and eat a few more meals. But nothing about me changed. I dreaded how I had to eat. She was going well, though. In the session, the strings of her underwear were cutting – not just visible as an outline, now, but right along the skin of her hips, so that the light picked it up from all angles. Soon I would have to add shading in for that. Her breasts met the edge of their bra cups where there used to be some space available, and the underside of her thighs kept dipping lower over the edge of her seat. The only thing that hadn’t grown, the way I’d come to anticipate, was her belly. It had just changed shape, in a way. Its roundness was showing some signs of warping, just slightly, at the edges.

And still, nobody had said anything. Soon I’d be screaming to ask. Screaming to myself.

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I didn’t faint as the week turned over to the next one, which was good. I ate one toast each morning, forcing it down before my data entry duties began at work, and few meals scattered through the week. I felt mediocre, but for once, not ill.

She was still looking softer. Perhaps not softer – smoother. Each incremental shift in shadow and light was still occurring. The strings of her underwear were making her flesh swell in places. The back of her bottom was finding the seat beneath her. Her belly hadn’t stuck out any further, but the softness under her darkening belly button seemed more voluminous somehow.

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Next week before the session, I actually managed to eat a breakfast like any other functioning human being in the world. Just one. But I felt proud. I’d finally put a foot forward onto solid ground. Yet it only lasted until I had to spend another hour looking at her again; whatever progress I’d made had been overshadowed. When she sat down on the platform, her belly bounced ina way I’d never seen before, and as my eyes caught its movement, I knew that such a development was something that I would never achieve. Not even if I tried to. I couldn’t believe I’d been drawing her stomach as a concave line not even six weeks prior. Every week I had to redraw it, and it looked like this was just going to be another.

Maybe I was soon going to give up. I was starting to stare with a fascination I couldn’t shake. A partition had appeared above her belly button, marked by a shallow line – almost a crease, but not quite – rather the foundations of the folds fat people get when they’re big enough… The line demarcated her stomach into a superficial upper and lower half, giving it a strange but elegantly undulating characteristic. I could not think how she could expose herself in such appropriately inappropriate decency with this amount of sheer confidence. It bordered on ignorance. She must have been plainly unaware how she looked, sitting as if she didn’t care what she looked like. Such bliss seemed impossible to me, a total fantasy that was light years into an impossible distance too vast to tread in time to save myself.

Suddenly something tapped on the windowpane of my attention, and I had to look closer, to peer through the mist of my own mind and its perceptions. Squinting, I looked at her posture and scrutinised it. Then I realised that she seemed to be arching her spine, just above the small of her back. I had no idea why she should have broken her otherwise flawless record of posture, identical from week to week, but there was just enough difference that I now had to redraw that portion of her back. I may have an eating disorder, but I am not insane. I was not hallucinating. It was beginning to discourage me that none of the other artists expressed even the slightest irritation towards this, much less any awareness of the growing pattern.

The session dragged on. I redrew her back, and then noticed that her breathing had grown rigid. She appeared to be breathing through her chest. And then, at the last moment when I thought her expression looked as if it was about to slip, I found out why that was the case. With a gasp I could barely overhear, her shoulders sank and her back slouched as she let herself relax. Her stomach pushed out, quickly erasing the faintly visible partition and allowing the lower curve of her belly spill over her underwear, as smooth as the underside of an egg, overshadowing her thighs. She blinked, then, just once. This slip, this mistake, of a split-second glance at me in a nervous flash… from under her large, arched eyelids, I glimpsed something I could not quite decipher (keeping me from sleep for a number of nights onwards). Then, as transient as dreamed-up lighting, the event came to an end. She turned her eyes back down to the floor, recomposed her facial muscles into that same thoughtless, statuesque boredom, and I do not recall her moving a muscle ever again.

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