Chapter 4

Ten long months later, we find Matilda stumbling through a new year at university. Sure, she’s changed a little; somewhat smarter in a bookish sense, and sure, she’s accustomed to the new schedule by now, but she is no less confused about where she’s going in life than any other shoulder-shrugging student drenched in despondent irony who you may meet in life as a young adult.

Just recently, Matilda has been through a shockingly late growth spurt. She’s gained an inch in height seemingly out of nowhere, then those slightly crooked teeth eased themselves straighter with the aid of a stint in those transparent dental bands they’ve been advertising everywhere. Her cheekbones decided to stand out a little further sometime during the last year or so, creating a defined angle from her ear to the corner of her mouth. Grandma started calling Matilda her “little late-bloomer”, but she still feels uncertain about things. Although she’s come to be okay with the way she looks, she can’t help but think that if her face keeps changing, it could morph beyond itself into a network of over-exaggerated, rounded angles.

Strangely, she hasn’t played a single game of football for five months. Not even put her laces on. It is a behaviour as strange as the phenomenon of the existent universe is itself. How did something just come into being from nowhere? How did someone as passionate as Matilda just fall out of love? Halfway through the semester, her passion had grown legs one morning and wandered off somewhere as if it had spotted something interesting on the side of the road, said a quick, “I’ll be right back,” and proceeded never to come back. Maybe the stress of her degree’s workload wormed its way into her soul? Maybe she began to feel too good for her team? Maybe she felt bored because she wasn’t being challenged anymore? Who knows… If she doesn't know, nobody will. All that’s certain is that most university study material is thrown onto the internet these days, and she’s been spending less time on campus, but more of it in bed with her laptop, eating the old cheese n’ crackers while watching the International Football Leagues and submitting her assignments in a sequence of last-minute efforts that get her scraping pass after narrow pass. Her teammates ring up now and again, asking her where she is, and if she can fill in. When that doesn’t produce results, they just ring on occasion to ask if she feels like filling in for a game here and there in the future, only to find out she can’t because “too much study to do”. And yet, in spite of it all, she will sometimes make an appearance at the last minute, often without any prior notice, get away with it by being thrown onto the pitch by her coaches who are desperate for her ingrained talent, and she’ll proceed to dribble the ball past defenders, do pirouettes, tricks, and put crosses into the box at narrow angles as neatly as she ever did, which nobody else can seem to match.

But now the umpteenth iteration of her pooch has come back, and this time with a dose of arrogance to match her own. You can get fat for the weirdest reasons. That’s what Jen had told her, which she still remembers, returning like an ear-worm of a song you cannot banish. Often she will notice her shirt has settled across a mushroom-like shape she’s never had the privilege of knowing before. Sometimes she’ll toy with its tactile squishiness, absentminded enough that she doesn’t immediately realise she has been doing it for the past ten minutes. Soon, the toying-with-it becomes more of a habit, like biting your nails. She actually doesn’t mind it, as things stand. The way it squashes between fingers. How smooth it is when she brushes it with the pads of her fingers. It’s kind of comforting to fidget with when she’s in the middle of a task, especially if she needs something to occupy her fingers and use brain power. On certain days, she can even feel it wiggle on her stomach with her steps if she has to do some running. The feeling isn’t very pronounced. She has to fold over her waist to produce anything shaped like a genuine roll of flesh. Some days it’s noticeably there, some days it’s not so much. Whenever she encounters a person that is medically overweight, she reminds herself that all she is burdened with is a bulge so miniscule that you wouldn’t notice it until someone pointed at it. Does her size draw attention when she walks down the mall? No. Does her belly look like a bulging pillow under her shirt? No, she’s not medically overweight. Does it hang out of her shirts? No, she’s not obese. Does her belt need another hole poked in it? That would be stupid. Do her hips shake? No. Are her thighs so fat they rub each other as she walks? No. She comes to remind herself about this from day to day, and it comforts her. Sometimes she even mentally paints a picture of herself twice her size, which is all she needs to remember that she’ll never look like that.

. . .

The year grinds on. The bulge invites an extra inch that she didn’t particularly ask for, but didn’t exactly prevent from happening either – nor loathe the presence of, necessarily. She should. But if she really wanted it gone, she would have put a muzzle on her eating habits before paying the price in the first place.

The calendar ticks over into another new year, and by March we find Matilda back on the wide green pitch with the wind-power of a tropical storm filling the sails of her soul. It must have been the Women’s World Cup. Immersing herself in the event blew hot air into her again. She’s practically a new girl. The broadcast had thrown it all at her eyes and down into her spirit; the quality, the talent, the skill, the dedication, the passion. Pure being. Her desire to do something great had stood up on its hind legs and banged behind her ribcage once more, savage as a lioness with all the energy of a thousand winters of hibernation to burn. When she expressed this to her parents, her father egged her on like a zealot, and her mother was just glad to see her daughter get out of the house again.

One night after a training session since her return to the club, she waits until she’s relatively alone in the locker room and finds a scale. Glancing around to make sure nobody’s around to watch, she quickly steps on. She fidgets as she waits for the flickering digits to freeze on a final result, then steps off in a hurry. Her backside jiggles gently. She feels it like a quiet murmur. That feeling was not muscle.

The scale reads 138 lbs, blaring the number at her eyes before resetting. So she’s five pounds lighter already, since getting her feet back out on the grass. When she weighed herself a month ago, she’d come in at a startling 143 lbs, which itself was eight pounds heavier than the year before, when she’d conducted her little experiment in becoming a bed-potato. Back then, before any of these silly weight-adjustments, her medical weight had reliably circled around 135 lbs, and nothing resembling a bump in her belly was there to be seen.

But none of that this year. It’s a new era. Call it experience, or call it growth – either way it has been much easier to balance the dualistic, sometimes tripartite nature, of her duties. University study has settled into its designated spot between training sessions, and vice-a-versa. If she has to defer a game now and then to kill off an assignment, no bad blood is ever spilled over it, because she shows up the next week. The club knows she’s here for good this time.

One morning, close to the end of her studies, she is out in the kitchen munching down the last of her breakfast toast when all of a sudden she picks her phone up from the bench to make a call. She’s still hungry as she lifts the phone to her ear, and something is fizzing with warmth at the bottom of her gizzards, pleading for more. ‘Hey coach,’ she trills, pressing the phone to her shoulder with her ear as she places a teflon pan upon the stovetop and fills it with more oil than she intended.

‘Matilda?’ comes Kendra McIvor, her coach, over the phone line.

‘Kendra! Yeah, hi! It’s me. Uh—’ She drops her shoulder to catch a carton of eggs before it slips out of her hand. ‘Just calling to say I’ve got some study stuff coming up, so I have to give next week’s game a miss.’

‘Oh… well–’

‘I thought I’d be responsible and let you know ahead.’

‘Okay. Thanks, Tild’. Only–’

‘I’m sorry that I can’t do it,’ cutting Kendra off with a nervous laugh that she tries to pass off as care-free. She cracks eggs into the pan. ‘I just–’

‘Oh, no, no! It’s no problem! Stacy can fill in; she got plenty of practice last year, so she’ll be a good in, no worries. Look, Tild’, don’t worry about it. You’ve been a champ thus far, truly. It’s been really wonderful to have you back.’

A brief pause severs the conversation in two as the implication lingers. Matilda blinks, feeling the need to explain herself over the debacle of last year’s slackness, but after a moment’s hesitation, she decides there’s no need.

‘Alright,’ she verbally nods. ‘I promise I’ll be there next week.’

Just then, her mother walks past outside the kitchen entrance on her way out to work, and Matilda smiles goodbye to her with a silent blown-kiss. ‘Thanks, then,’ she returns to Kendra, taking milk from the fridge and pouring a small dose into the pan. Pausing at a second thought, she pours in another two doses, her actions whipped by a terrible hunger. ‘I’ll be there for most of the games after, I really wanna promise that.’

‘I’m sure you will be. Thanks, Tild.’

‘Good luck with the game.’

‘Thanks, Tild. Good luck with your study. See ya later then.’

Sliding her phone back onto the kitchen bench, she returns to preparing scrambled eggs and drifts away into a realm of guilt-tinted rumination. Funny, when she thinks about last year; she thinks back on all those nights spent snacking in the warmth of her bed. Just at that moment, her stomach goes hollow with a cold pang of doubled hunger, reverberating like a cannon shot. Or is it a blast of shame that she’s feeling? She never used to have this problem of distinction. It used to be clear. This is anything but. A snack-shaped craving sits inside her like an unoccupied plot of land, giving off an irritated rumble from the depths of its earthen core. ‘Shut up,’ she mentally hisses at her tummy, ‘wait your turn.’

Things might have been okay, if it had waited. But alas, by the time she’s finished her second round of breakfast at her desk in her room, something comes unstuck in her belly once again, and before long, she’s cast herself to the gusts of oblivious whim and overdone it on various snacks from the pantry, which had only just been restocked two nights ago.

Presently she scoots back in her chair with hot cheeks and scans lethargically either side of her on the surface of the desk, taking drowsy note of all the empty packets and half-finished boxes of crackers lying open like massacred prey. ‘Oh, fuck me for fuck’s sake,’ she mumbles, ‘what’d I just do?’

Already aware that she wants to pretend that she doesn’t know, she nevertheless lifts her shirt up to look down at what she already knows is there. Her tummy is only vaguely soft with its distension. Ever since it’s been regularly exercised again, an imprint of abdominal muscles have resurfaced in two delicate, elegant strips, but… somewhere in the last hour or so, they've been forced to bend outwards, and… there’s something else that isn’t right. She peers closer, squinting gently. She could swear they’ve actually taken on a softness along with the distension. She touches her bloated stomach, letting her hand glide over her skin, feeling its smoothness through her sensory awareness. She wonders how much of all the food inside her will be digested to make its return as softened flesh.

For a moment, her heart rate surges. Then it quietens back down again once her train of thought lands upon a realisation. It doesn’t matter, really. Whatever manages to come back as an “inch to pinch” as they say, well it won’t last long by the time she’s back at training on the weekend. And that’s the whole point, after all. Isn’t it? To reap the benefits? To just train harder and reverse the consequences? She can undo whatever damage she does – and that’s how she’s lucky enough to possess the occasional licence to actually enjoy herself. With a nervous blink and a short sniff, she covers her belly with her shirt and lowers her head over her study notes, trying to shift her train of thought and transplant it onto academic tracks.

You can get fat for the weirdest reasons. That’s what Jen had told her, years ago. But it doesn’t really matter. Matilda knows she’ll never get fat.

. . .