Chapter 102 (Finale)

‘So, what next?’ Carlile asks one day as they drive in the car to another rental inspection on a fluke cold and blustery day that keeps hinting at sprinkles of rain, which is strange, because summer isn’t meant to be damp.

‘Well, if I wanted to coach people my age, in an actual club, I’d have to do more than this.’

‘Okay. And how long would that muffin take to bake?’

‘Why? Are you trying to push me to become a full time coach?’

‘No. I’m just encouraging you. Like I have been this whole time.’

‘I know you are.’ Matilda smiles sadly at him, annoyed with herself for being underhanded. ‘Well… I’ve got my level one licence. The next is the level two licence. But they told me it’s a good idea to get experience first. Like, you go coach at an amateur club. Something casual. Some people do assistant coaching and learn by watching the head coach there, observing and learning, and all that sort of stuff. Then if you get a level two licence, you do seventy hours of in-class learning or something, then you get assessed at the end. Then you’d do more experience. It is kind of full on. And repetitive.’ She sits up straighter in her seat and squints at the road ahead. ‘I think that’s it there– that must be it,’ she says, pointing at a row of newly constructed units facing the street with big, white, cubic faces, three storeys tall. The advertised listing said the unit was on the second level.

They pull into a shared parking space and look at the other rent-seekers milling about, some entering the open door of the lower level, some exiting.

‘Welp,’ they both say in unison, swapping glances. This will make the eighteenth rental they’ve visited. They feel like they’ve seen every corner, every street and every cranny of the city by now.

As she sits forward to push herself out of the seat, the zipper of her new leather jacket, begrudgingly purchased on an online “plus size” store, balloons under the pressure of her gut, which had already been pressing against her clothes to begin with.

Carlile’s waist widens as he leans forward to stand up.

The two of them, standing on either side of the car with a hand laid flat on the roof, look like duplicate clones of their former selves who someone had inflated with bike pumps through their belly buttons.

It is small and cramped inside the foyer, and the stairs zig zag up to the right, making it feel more like a basement than anything else.

Matilda feels the need to take larger breaths than normal once she’s cleared the top of the stairs. ‘If I end up getting fatter this could become a problem,’ she says, then turns to watch Carlile take the final steps behind her and can only watch in awe. His pot belly bounces up and down through his tank top, looking like his waist has been cut out and replaced by a balloon full of water. She knows he’s doing his best not to make a similar remark about himself. Giving his butt a slap as he moves past, Matilda follows him to the third unit down where the door is open and a real estate agent is giving out information flyers to would-be tenants. They step through the door and emerge into an open, brightly lit hallway. Grabbing a flyer from the agent, they only need to take one look around. They can see it already. It’s perfect for them.

Already, they’re unleashing their imaginations, postulating what could go where and how.

‘And a couch can go here,’ Matilda says, running a hand around the corner of the living area.

‘And a TV there.’

‘Maybe a big plant there, between those two windows.’

‘Or two. Or three.’

‘Or five! And your fold-out lounge could go over there near the entrance to the kitchen. That would be super cosy! We could have movie nights still!’

Sucking up their pride as hard as they suck in their bellies, they confront the agent at the door with his slicked back hair and opulent rings on his fingers, and offer to pay ten dollars extra on top of advertised weekly rent. A response comes back in the next couple of days around lunch time in the form of an email, with a big fat Yes-and-Thank-You stamped on it, and in no more than a week they’re already making moves into their new rental.

The emotional-energetic chaos of saying goodbye to one and a half thousand dollars in bond, of packing everything they own into boxes that are barely able to hold together without breaking, of phone call after phone call to set up electricity and gas accounts, of looking for and buying appliances they lacked the foresight to acquire when they still had time, of watching their savings shrink overnight from spending money just to breathe, and of departing from their ingrained sense of routine to be left floundering in the empty dark for something to anchor their sense of time to – it all snowballs into a landslide of comfort food, too many calories, and excessive binge-eating episodes, just to relieve the waves of overwhelming stress that never seem to fully subside.

But even the most terrible storms peter out to an end. When it’s finally time to load all the boxes into their cars and transport their lives into a new home, Carlile already looks bigger somehow. With a discerning eye from afar, Matilda feels certain he’s put on at least five or ten pounds in the last few weeks. Lungs sore from a level of exercise she hasn’t had to perform in over half a year, she takes a break from moving boxes to watch Carlile pull a sack trolley from the removalist van. In a tight-fitting tank top, his thicker, ever-softening arms exert the strength needed to lift heavy boxes onto the base of the sack trolley, then tip it backwards into a tilt. She watches the cheeks of his backside jerk heavily against the pants of his pinstripe joggers as he wheels the sack trolley over to the ramp of the van, then spins around to pull it up in reverse. Her eyes go glassy when his stomach presses against the upper handlebar of the sack trolley and mounds over it, his back arching and causing his belly to swell out in a heavy bulge that bounces aggressively with each heaving step he takes up the ramp’s length. Her tongue goes wet, and she is overcome with such intense desire that it makes her feel sick. When he comes back down the ramp, he has to jog a little to keep the sack trolley from running away from him, and with each jolt of his heels, his belly jiggles harder until he hits the ground and his tank top slips up just enough to show a little strip of belly flesh sagging out. Either he doesn’t know about it, or is feeling cheeky about her perving on him from a distance, because he doesn’t even bother to adjust it until much later.

It takes them two nights to move all their gear across town and then make a last trip for the small, miscellaneous things. The new double bed mattress they purchased arrives in the afternoon, and they get busy putting it together in their new bedroom. By the time they finish constructing the base, heaving the massive thing onto its frame and moving it into place, they have to leave it bare and unmade so they can sit down on the lounge, panting, flushed and slightly sweaty.

‘Wanna just put the sheets on later?’ Carlile suggests.

Cradling her midsection, which shouldn’t feel this voluminous in her arms, lets her head fall against the back of the lounge and stares at the ceiling, still breathing heavier than she’d like. She nods. ‘Yeah. Later. Can we get something? I’m hungry.’

‘Thought so. So am I.’

They order a nice big takeaway meal, which takes the better part of an hour for the Uber driver to deliver, opening up a burgeoning vacuum of hunger in their stomachs that grows like a bubble until Matilda can finally go downstairs to retrieve it from the apartment complex’s foyer door.

Coming back up the stairs, clutching brown paper bags full of food against her chest, a shocking feeling suddenly descends upon her. She suddenly feels lodged inside of some sort of forcefield of gluttony. An aesthetic of hedonism. A painting of rotund, weighted proportions. Like an actress dressed up in a costume who must now fully embody the part to play. In other words, Matilda is struck in an explosion of raw understanding that she must look incredibly fat to anyone who might see her. As if her mind’s attention has been given a microscope with which to zoom in on the sensations of the world, with each step up the stairs, she feels the shaking and quivering filtering through all of her distended, perfectly soft, rounded layers of fat, the combined weight creating just enough of an extra load for her calves to carry that she has no choice but to feel her own weight. She says a whispered Oh Jesus as her soul elongates to the heavens with exhilarated shock – because she realises she has to ask the question. Has she gotten fatter?

Avoiding the cardboard box she knows contains the bathroom scales, she walks straight past the bathroom and comes into the living room to find Carlile without his shirt. Its crumpled form lies beside him. He’s already turned the TV on to scroll through streaming services, and it's when she looks at his laid-back body that she realises his belly is on the verge of turning into a genuine gut. It is as soft as a planet in the pale blue light of the screen, and only faintly hairy where his belly button is big and deep enough that it could hold a coin.

Sitting down next to him and folding her chubby legs under her haunches, she holds a chunk of his flab in one hand so she can give his belly a forceful shake. She watches it bounce up and down, and asks, ‘Ready to fill this cute little baby up?’

‘Only if you fill yours up first.’

‘No way.’ She recoils with a sceptical look on her face. ‘I’m losing it all, remember?’

This time, Carlile lets out a heartfelt laugh, thumbing through the options on the screen while shaking his head in amused disbelief.

‘What the fuck, Carl?’ Matilda arcs up. ‘The fuck are you laughing about?’ But her voice sounds unconvincing and powerless, even to her.

‘Seriously?’ He looks over at her with careful inquiry in his gaze. Then he turns his shoulders towards her and reaches down to give her a quick stab in the corner of her paunch, the tender surface of which bulges out the sides of her waistline like a tire all the way from lovehandle to belly button. ‘Look how tight your shirt is,’ he remarks.

Matilda curls her mouth into a dismissive upside-down U shape and shrugs.

‘Look,’ Carlile teases, picking at the hem of her shirt, which sits flush as paint against her skin. He turns the hem up, laying bare the devastatingly soft, sausage-like roll that ecompasses the side of her waistline. He gives the front of her belly a slap. The impact emits a deep thud, rocking the rugby ball shaped roll of lard squashed in the space between her thickening thighs and growing breasts.

‘Don’t even ask me to weigh myself,’ she finally growls with a severe expression that says she’s one broken eggshell away from snapping at him. ‘I won’t do it. But you, however. We need to find out what’s happened to you, fatso.’

‘I am not fat.’

‘Yes you are. Look at that.’ She pokes her finger into his paunch and gives it a few pats to make it tremble. Satisfied she’s won, she turns her attention to their food delivery and begins unloading it all onto the lounge.

Carlile squints at her. ‘If you’re so convinced you aren’t fat, then neither am I.’

‘No, that’s right, I’m not fat. I’m just chubby. You’re fat, however. And you’re mine. That makes you my little fat boy.’

‘A-a-alright, then.’ Carlile tips his head. ‘We shall see. We shall see.’

‘No we god-damn-won’t “see”.’

He smirks at her. ‘Next set of clothes you buy will.’

‘Fuck you. Here, have your burger. Quick. Eat up. Yeah, that’s it. Good– oh and you know what? Because of what you just said, you have to eat both our meals now.’

And over the next hour, he almost does, except that when Matilda watches him work his jaw open to fit the last half of what was going to be her burger, she realises she can’t stand to watch that happen, and in the flash of a scorpion’s sting, she snatches it out of his hands. Eyeing the burger resentfully, she scoffs it down her throat like it’s the last meal she’ll ever have, sits back, and clasps her hands across the upper bulge of her stomach.

. . .

Night’s darkness hunches across the city, and a second delivery driver is pulling up the curb outside their block. He steps out of the car, carrying two bags of food up to the foyer door, rings the buzzer, then leaves the packages on the ground and drives away. Not even thirty minutes later, that food is already devoured.

Midnight comes and goes. Matilda Nolasco and her boyfriend cause themselves to grow just that little bit fatter as they eat more than they need yet again.

Matilda goes on to declare that she is not “fat”. But she is. Every curve and line of her silhouette has been inching closer and closer to two-hundred pounds. Her stomach extrudes from her waistline, the outline of which is widened by chunky lovehandles, and her breasts have begun to rest on the upper slope of her stomach whenever she sits in a slouch. Her thighs are pillowy, no longer fitting in any of her underwear and causing a desperate strain in the tight weave of her nylon sportswear, which she does not use anymore apart from the comfort of sitting or laying around in the privacy of their own place while eating snack after snack. If she does not stop herself, it won’t just be Carlile growing even larger.

But the problem is; precisely the absence of a problem. There is no true reason for her to stop this, no real sense of danger to scare her off the course she’s set sail upon, no matter how militantly she declares that she will eventually lose the weight.And yet that is what frightens her the most. While it scares her that she got this fat, that she hasn’t stopped – most of all it frightens her that she can’t stop.

And above it all, a terrible sin looms like oppressive weather. It’s the fact that she made herself this fat. That she had done it all on purpose.

There is no telling where she will end up, now. It may be that her final destination even extends to the further ends of the bathroom scales themselves.

When she leans forward to get up from the lounge, late that night, the sound of a small rip comes from a dodgy seam somewhere in her leggings…









FINISH





Thank you for reading.