Chapter 3

Having enrolled to study a Bachelor of Human Movement, the sports sciences faculty is gracious enough to grant her “prior learning” on introductory lessons. Chin held high, she skips straight over the basics, laughing smugly, and crashes head-first into the complex theory. She finds herself promptly thrown out of her depth, sideways, spinning into a style of life about which nobody told her what to expect or how to act, especially among students who are ahead of her well into their second semester, already looking left and right under the onset of bitter disillusionment. It feels as if she needed to be older, for all this… like she’s living the life of an adult stranger somebody has mistaken her for. There is nothing to do, and nobody to waste time with in between lectures — so for all intents and purposes, she is left with no choice but to spend her time bumming around the food outlets in the main complex. With more opportunity to gorge on food than she’s ever been exposed to in her life, she resists the urge to binge on sheer variety for about two weeks. That is, until her third week, when she walks into the main complex one Tuesday morning after not eating breakfast, and is met with the sweltering scent of thick bread, freshly baked, the sweetness of fried noodles somewhere to one side, marinated chicken over the other side, stuffed burritos and sushi behind the glass casing over there at the other end of the court, this fusion of smells bulldozing her impulse control under the overpowering weight of its allure — and promptly realises that if she doesn’t order the largest item off the nearest menu immediately, she will faint from hunger right where she stands.

The problem comes when she reaches a point of fullness and can’t dismiss the stupid, silly idea that she should keep going. Why? She has no idea. But she has no idea why she runs up and down the grass pitch every weekend like her life depends on it. She just does it, following the lead of a gigantic, blind instinct that repeating the same action is the best thing to do. You do it, and you do it, and then you do it again, until you get it right.

To begin with, she holds it all at a distance, making a tour of the food court only on a Tuesday. By the third Wednesday, it’s as if a hole has been etched into the storage space inside her out of sheer necessity, and now it wants to be filled. Every Tuesday and Wednesday she blows the allowance her parents give her on food, saving none of it. By the time she realises she’s saved nothing, it’s too late. Her efforts to contain it all to a Tuesday and Wednesday have ruptured at the sides like a leaking ship, and she’s going there Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, grabbing breakfast and lunch, then going home to force herself down whatever meal is prepared for dinner into a stomach that is doing itself harm trying to stretch.

The soft shape makes a rapid comeback. Within her first semester, Matilda is visited by a handful of chub having returned to pad out the flesh around her belly button. She ignores it.

But as the weeks progress one by one, it only sticks around. But it doesn’t blow out of proportion, either. It’s as if it has come pre-programmed with a specific size and will remain right there. No amount of eating seems to make it grow, and no amount of sprinting up and down the pitch each week until she’s ragging for breath seems to make it shrink. But she gets the feeling, faint as a swelling wave unable to stand tall enough to crash, that continuing to eat as large and often she has been will overpower her exercise sooner or later.

One night, she has a dream that she is pulling the chain of an anchor up from a muddy sea that won’t stop rolling, small waves building in intensity, because she comes to understand that a storm is coming in from somewhere, though there is no wind, and she pulls and pulls – and her arms are growing tired, but the chain won’t end. Is this, in her hands, even an anchor? It must be an anchor, she can feel its weight, and she pulls, until after hours she realises she was never pulling the chain up, but rather she has been slowly pulling herself down — and just before she can release her hand from the chain, she wakes up.

It’s all too clear to her, then. She’s studying goddamned human movement and yet she’s acting like it’s a free-for-all. The very study of bodily performance and the benefits of exercise, how to improve your body’s athletic development, and she’s been letting herself get carried away eating beyond the point of fullness because… for no other reason than because she can.

Full sudden, Matilda is granted a view through the window of bodily shame. In a gunshot of embarrassment and guilt, she understands how it feels. She finds herself sucking in whenever she eats, even if she doesn’t need to. Whenever she does eat, she makes sure to eat less of whatever it is that’s in front of her. Occasionally she finds herself letting a forearm rest over her stomach, just in case people’s eyes perceive something that looks too… round? Paranoia creeps towards her from the sidelines, and she glances back at it askance. Her willingness to appear in a bikini drops in frequency. Later on that year, during a spell of hot days through the Spring, she is in the middle of fitting on a two-piece black swimsuit before heading to the beach with her school friends. None of those busy young people have been able to see each other for months. Midway through dressing herself, Matilda stops moving to contemplate her choices. She looks down into the body length mirror beside her dresser. She thinks her belly looks too round above the black drawstrings of her two-piece. All until her sense of objectivity kicks back in, coughing up a last hurrah, tired and used up. Of course, she knows, her stomach is by all accounts normal when compared to the millions of other naked female stomachs. The only abnormality was the fact that she had been so trim in the first place. Any change no matter how small must look like a "fall from grace" when such an unattainable standard had been reached. Perhaps her body was simply doing what it was meant to do, just like everybody else on the planet. But then, returning like a boomerang that laughs in mockery as it approaches; her growing impulse to cover herself in an effort to repress all evidence of slovenliness just as long as it takes for her to bring her defined abs back to life. She vacillates back and forth in her mind. By the end of her torturous deliberation, she decides to bite the bullet and wear the two-piece, proving to herself that she can be braver than any of her silly new insecurities. After all, she is a footballer, and her winning mentality has always been her confident one. Why can it not apply in civilian life as well?

Down at the beach, her friends reunite, catching up, telling stories, venting frustrations, but never making any indication or mention of Matilda’s appearance. This alone is enough to send her home happy and convinced that her choice to be bold was the right one.

A few weeks later, though, something almost changes her mind completely as to whether it was a good idea, revealing her "brave boldness" to have been "shameful arrogance" all along. Until the day she dies, she’ll remember when her friends decided to take her along for a dip at the Spa & Sauna complex at Pyereville Heights.

It is a cold day at the tail-end of Spring, just before the transitional season must give up its place. She has put a shirt on over her swimwear, feeling that she will only draw the stares of stranger's eyes towards her stomach like a black hole — all because of the previous week. She’d lapsed twice in the last four days and eaten so much in multiple sittings that she woke up that weekend and found it hard to button a familiar pair of jeans for the first time in her life. So, having spent an hour in the spa, her shirt, floating weightless as a ghost in the warm bubbling water around her, soaks her in a deceitful sense of comfortability. It vanishes the instant she stands up from the water, and she regrets the decision to wear the shirt. It was meant to be a shield, cover from enemy fire. It is the opposite. All of a sudden she is thrown out in the cold on her ass into the path of bullets from the eyes of strangers, feeling as good as naked. Members of the public swim, walk and talk all around her, and she knows that if anybody would look her way, the first thing they’d notice is her shirt adhering with heavy, sopping wetness around her waist like cling wrap, outlining its shape with humiliating, hyperbolic honesty. She can feel it on her skin. It sticks around her middle. The ghost of the feeling sticks to her body long after, like honey.

It lingers through the fortnight, even as she sits at her desk trying to study, unable to stop remembering, returning over and over to the event like she’d missed something. The corner of her lip twists with uncertain dislike of what her eyes see when she lowers them into her lap. She tugs her shirt down, putting the problem out of sight. But… her fingers feel stuck. She cannot let go of the shirt. The curiosity she feels is a powerful vortex. Biting her lip, she lifts her shirt back up again, and has a long, good hard look. It’s still there. Below her shy but perky breasts, there sits a slightly rounded-out pooch. For a while, she stares at it from above without moving a muscle. It looks as peaceful as a sleeping infant. She watches it inch back and forth with the cycles of her breathing — the curved surface’s tiny deflation as it retreats reassures her that she isn’t under threat of having “a bit of a gut” as her father jokingly calls his own mammothian waistline. Then comes the inflation as hers swells out a little, bringing her belly button a little further over her lap as her small paunch asserts its presence with more authority. Then it sinks back again. And it comes out again. The rhythm is hypnotic, coming in and out of being in perpetuity, constant as the tick of a clock – teetering on the edge of being a belly, and not being a belly. “To be or not to be” a belly. It diminishes. Then it expands. It sinks. Then it swells.

Swells. The word swirls between her sears… But wait a sec, maybe that’s just it. The swell of it. Maybe she really is just a bit “swollen”. If she hadn’t been eating so many foods that induce bloating in the first place, she wouldn’t be dealing with this in the first place. It’s just bloating. Tracing her finger across the outside of her navel, she digs down into her belly. Before she knows what’s happened, the softened flesh of her tummy has already risen around her pressing fingertip, giving into it like fresh putty. She can even push her fingertip around and watch the little layer of flesh squish around to accommodate it.

Well bugger, she says to her sinking heart. It is fat.

Fed up with feeling like the world expects her to be ashamed of something to stupid, she scowls and covers up her tummy. She turns her mind aside, mentally fatigued, and resolves to allow not one more thought, nor a care in the world for how she might look, to touch her. She cannot afford to think about it any longer. Nothing, after all, has changed how good she is at playing her sport — so why should it matter that she has developed a mere handful of softness?

Matilda takes a deep breath and slides down in her chair, looking up at the corner of the room. A purple object of huge significance lingers in the corner of her eye. She turns to look at it. Hanging on the wall of her bedroom, facing the door, is her spare jersey; dark purple with violet sleeves, the trim white and gold. The bold number 18 is printed in white on the left sleeve. She feels drawn up by a great surge of wind beneath her diaphragm. She gets up from her desk and crosses the room to stand in front of her shirt, raising a hand to smooth the creases out from under each sleeve. A note of pride sings through her heart, thrumming in harmony with the white and blue shield insignia of Purple Vale Strikers SC. 1911. “All Heart or All for Nothing” in tiny cursive text is inscribed in the banner below.

That Friday night she is on the pitch, under the floodlights, wearing the shirt, sprinting up and down the pitch, eyes tracing the ball as it sails back and forth in arcs through the night air. Yells pierce the air. Deep reverberant thuds as boots meet ball again and again. A long kick ends with the ball in the enemy goalkeeper’s hands, swapping the direction of play. She comes to a hard stop, small vibrations going through her outer thighs. Distracted by the strange new feeling, she almost misses the ball as it spins off an opponent’s head by accident and bounces towards her. She digs her heel into the turf, switches direction, and meets the ball. She stops it at her feet, then knocks it left and dribbles away with her prize, screaming at her teammates to move up the pitch. An enemy defender sprints at her, eyes analysing the direction of her hips, slowing down to shephard her along the boundary line. But Matilda manages to feint left, then right, then cuts past her opponent’s left even as the ball rolls past their outside leg. Matilda reclaims the ball on the other side, leaving the defender spinning around to begin chasing her all over again. The other defenders are closing in towards her as she bolts into the middle of the pitch. Thankfully Elisha, their midfielder, has read Matilda’s intentions just in time and zooms in to receive her pass, lobbing it over to Kelsey on the other side, who bounces it back to Elisha, who this time has more space in front of her. As Matilda moves along, she once again notices that little loose vibration in her tummy and backside. She jogs up to the corner of the box, positioning herself behind the enemy defenders and hopping from side to side.

The Purple Vale Strikers go ahead to win the match 2-0, working like a perfectly-calibrated clock, all its parts and members moving with and around each other in confident, intentional synchronisation, predictive of one piece to the next. In the change rooms the atmosphere is thick with pride. While stepping out of their kits and into civilian clothes, Matilda caves to curiosity and lifts her eyes. She looks at her teammates’ bodies as they dress. Not a single girl on this team is anywhere near chubby. None of them are even soft. Every one of her teammates has no more than ten-to-twenty percent body fat at most, leaving every muscle visibly delineated to the eye. The only exception would be Suri Ahashi, whose tummy has a slight curve to it. Suddenly conscious of her own stomach, Matilda sucks in a little before pulling her shirt over her head. She towels herself down, trying to be swift. When she puts her grey top on, she realises it feels silly to suck in a belly that isn’t really there. No, she’s fit as a leopard. She’s sure of it. She just won a game. She is in prime physical form – what’s the point in acting otherwise?

. . .