Chapter 100

As a receptionist, it’s all so methodical that once the appearance of its complexity rubs off, the job is exposed as nothing more than mere routine – a systematic and unsurprising list of tasks that she comes to know like the back of her hand in a matter of about five days. As soon as her shadow shifts conclude, she sends her bank details, tax file number and superannuation forms over to the finance coordinator, an older woman by the name of Ruth, and no sooner than a week later she witnesses the beginnings of a cash-flow beginning to trickle into her bank account, a place which was previously barren as a desert.

Problem is, it doesn't take long for the mundanity of the tasks to set like clay, and a sense of boredom takes gentle hold of her mind. It isn’t enough to drive her crazy, but it is just powerful enough that she needs to hold it at bay by means of some distraction or other.

Quinn will often use her lunch breaks to visit the shopping complex situated across the multi-lane arterial road in front of the building. ‘Any requests?’ she will ask every time before she leaves.

And so to begin with, Matilda offers a stern and vigilant no thankyou whenever Quinn drops the question like an exit card. But she will ask again the next day. And then the next day. Due to nothing but habit, each day Quinn will ask. And each day that Quinn brings back hot chips steaming with gravy, or cheese-bulging burritos that suffuse the air with the lulling scent of protein and carbs, or pork rolls smelling strongly of sweet juices, or whole packets of chips, or blocks of chocolate, or sometimes even thick-rimmed pizzas rich with hot, greasy aromas, and then proceed to graze on them throughout the day – well Matilda can do nothing but try to buffer the fortress walls of her mind against the ongoing siege of forbidden foods, day after day after day. By the time her mental defences finally surrender, crumbling to ash beneath the onslaught, she feels too starved to resist simply by bearing the weapons of logic alone. Hunger seems to come down around her like the entire sky falling down.

She leaves her professional button-up shirts and their constant threats of malfunction behind, abandoning them for a rotation of plain black tops and mute-coloured skirts that won’t expose the chunkier contours of her body.

.

By the time hardly two months have gone by on the job, she’s already become so familiar with the work that she can get away with busting open a packet of snacks beneath the cover of the desk’s upper partition, so long as nobody is around to hear the incriminating sound. Feeling like a mouse, she eats bits of food here and there to fill the gaps of empty mental space that boredom forces open between waves of clientele. Her urge to treat herself grows into an urge to graze, which grows into an urge to maintain a feeling of slight fullness. Perhaps this would have been okay, except that it develops a gradient that she begins to slide down like it’s greased. No matter what time of day, busy or slow, hot or cold, tired or awake, she wants to feel full, and to stay full. In a matter of a month or two, no longer does she snack simply to paint over spells of boredom – she’s painting over the stressful and busy spells as well, using all manner of delicious foods to colour her day.

Some of the girls from the team reach out to her, from time to time, hoping to check in. They keep asking to catch up, but the mere question of it spears into Matilda’s heart with a javelin of anxiety and panic that she can’t pin-point the origins of, or even dislodge from her chest, without putting something in her stomach to use as a steady foundation from which to contemplate her own emotional fluctuations. From what the girls are telling her, the team in her absence has coasted like a car in neutral, rolling to a bang-average finish for the season, leaving a collective feeling as flat-lined as the heartbeat of a corpse. “All Heart Or All For Nothing”, indeed.

Bethany informs her one night via text that ever since Matilda quit during the last half of the season, the Purple Vale Strikers girls have lost almost every single match, bar one, which was a draw – and apparently Margery has only become more stubborn since then, more withdrawn, and more volatile than ever.

A few months down the track, when Matilda would usually be re-uniting with all her teammates on the training pitch to make initial preparations for next year’s season, she hears through the grape-vine that some of the girls decided to leave. It isn’t until April checks in with Matilda over the phone one Friday afternoon that the rumours are confirmed. Three of them have quit. Evangeline, their only dedicated striker, is gone, with no one to replace her; Talina decided to move to another club because she was “bored”; and Grace, one of their only depth-players, has left the club to look for somewhere else to play. Now some young amateurs from the university and affiliated high-school academies have found themselves called up to fill shoes that are still a size too large…

When she says goodbye to April over the phone and promises, without really believing it, that they’ll catch up soon, Matilda finds herself staring blankly at the tops of her shoes. She’s at a party with Carlile as his plus-one – an old friend of his turning twenty-four. Or is it twenty-five? It’s deep into the night, and she’d come outside the function on her own to get some silence and hear the conversation. Now she’s sitting alone on the edge of a platform like a smoker who doesn’t smoke. Music mumbles at her through the walls.

She slips her phone into her purse and zips it shut… but putting the device out of sight doesn’t do the same for the news it just delivered to her ear.

So this is the grand total of the legacy of the once mighty Purple Vale Strikers. This is all the club could eventuate towards. Risen to its apotheosis and doomed only to decline from that apex with nothing but a sad, paralysed whimper. Is that all? An ancient poem on a parchment, set aflame to curl and wither into a dark grey ash, falling to the ground and smearing to a fine dust beneath the boots of time’s indifferent movement? A dog shot down in the street before its day? A band’s live performance messed up, the sound cut off just before the crescendo had a chance to build? A caterpillar’s cocoon rocked from its branch by wind and smashed to a pulp before the butterfly had its chance to be born?

It’s a lot like Margery’s own failure, Matilda realises. The sad, unimpressive silence of someone stopping short of success, and quietly withdrawing into their irrelevance, never to be seen or heard from again.

Matilda sneers at the thought of that sour bitch continuing to dismantle the club’s heart, and bites into another oil-coated dim sim from a plate she brought outside with her.

. . .

It isn’t until she feels the sides of her waist being cut into one afternoon by the last pair of leggings she’d bought that she realises she’s been lying to herself purely for the sake of how easy it has been to do so. No, she has not gotten her appetite under control. She hasn’t even begun to tame the beast of it. It has been alive and active as a Bengal Tiger escaped from captivity. Stretching her capacity beyond its natural limits too often during her campaign of over-eating has made the lining of her stomach expect to be treated like elastic, day in and day out. The negligent snacking on top of breakfast, lunch and dinner, leaves her stranded deep in a territory of caloric-surplus she wouldn't be able to escape even if she tried to. It’s simply too late for her. The damage has been done; done long ago.

One day during her lunch break, she’s crossing the road to the neighbouring shopping complex on the hunt for something to eat when she spots an advertisement on the side panel of a bus shelter. It is the iconic white, black and orange layout of Silver-Evans Real Estate co., reminding folk to sell and buy property through their agents. The simpering, lopsided grins of the realtor moguls in the poster make her feel compelled to lump them in with the same ilk as Margery and her friends. She looks away, simmering in her own hurt silence. But when she crosses the road, she passes beside the advertisement at close range, and she glances up at it again, the first spiral of a thought germinating in her mind. The tiny houses and apartments in the poster’s background make her think of lives lived around the globe, about families, about couples – and all at once it reminds her that Carlile had been suggesting how they should move out together one day.

The first thing on her mind is what to get for lunch. But she can’t banish the secondary thought of houses and apartments lurking in her consciousness like a low tone. It isn’t until she makes a quick detour into the public restrooms and empties her bladder that she decides to remind him about it.

Ignoring her reflection in the mirror as she washes her hands – of her belly sticking out below her breasts like a balloon – she tugs on her shirt to create some looseness over her stomach, then exits the restroom and calls Carlile while taking the escalators up towards the food court and the magnificence of all its sense-filling aromas.

‘Hey babe…’ she says absently, scanning left and right to let her subconscious whims decide what food to eat today, ‘Uh… maybe at mine tonight?… yeah, okay– hey, I was thinking… I’ve been working at this clinic for a couple months now, so… Yeah! Exactly. How did you know? … Well, I think it might be time? … Okay so, something reminded me how we were talking about moving out together, and… Yeah… Yes!… Exactly!… Let’s do it!’

. . .

The first set of units they visit on a hot Sunday evening greets their noses with a reeking, inescapable stench of rot that she can’t seem to pin-point the source of, and the tour lasts no longer than a balloon deflating. They attend a second inspection that day, and the agent tries to commit daylight robbery with a shockingly expensive asking price.

As they’re leaving the inspection, they happen to spot a cosy-looking brunch bar across the street emitting strong wafts of delicious food, so they decide to eat their feelings of bitterness away by ordering whatever the hell smells so good.

Over the next few months, they spend their weekends hopping from rental to rental like lily pads, seeing every apartment in town, but never feeling satisfied with anything.

Christmas jingles into town with all its magical fanfare of insanely rushed commerce before fading away with a nation-wide epidemic of gifted commodities, bloated stomachs and families reconnecting for the first time in a while. Then after a breath, New Year’s Eve rolls past, flipping the world over into the new year with fireworks going off in a slow, rolling wave perpendicular to the Greenwich Meridian line.

Uncles and aunts and cousins Matilda has not seen since she had anything more than a fold of skin on her waistline come rollicking into festive gatherings doing double-takes at her, sometimes ten times or more in a row all day long. Matilda can’t figure out what to do about it except dish out a variety of ill-planned, inconsistent responses. To some she drags out the old tried-and-tested lie that she’s simply “dirty bulking”. To relatives she hardly knows, she tries to avoid going anywhere near them, and if they do look at her strangely, her answer is to look at them strangely right back. Not many people try talking to her. A couple of cousins under the age of six ask her if she’s going to have a baby, and unable to think of anything else on the spot, she just shrugs and says, ‘I guess so!’. One ninety-eight year-old man named Bill who turns out to be a great grand-uncle on her mother’s she forgot she even had, on the more dangerous side of senility, straight up asks her if she’s ever tried a product called “Obetrol” – a drug, Matilda learns after hurrying away red-faced to Google it on her phone, that was basically a form of amphetamine women were sold in the ‘50s to make them lose huge amounts of weight. It even had the slogan “Don’t Be Fat!”

. . .

Before they fall into a quicksand pit of insanity, Matilda and Carlile take a break from rent seeking. Things get too chaotic around this time of year. December and January, in the southern hemisphere of the world, arrives with the summer’s full heat descending over the land to roast rooftops of houses and cook the insides of cars until driving feels like sitting inside a pizza oven… and with the summer season comes a surge in volume of people who decide they want to move houses. So, rubbing their hands, landlords ask for more monthly rent, and real estate agents rip off would-be tenants with absurd prices, and every other prospective renter at a property inspection is now your enemy over what are essentially overpriced scraps.

‘This is crazy,’ Carlile says one afternoon as they sit by the beach, watching the sun make its way down. ‘People are over-egging the pudding. It’s like rush-hour, out there.’

Matilda unwraps the pile of hot chips they’d just bought and slides them a little closer to Carlile. ‘That’s because it is,’ she says. ‘Honestly, I think we need to wait it out a little bit. We can actually afford to do that, anyway– it’s not like we’ve got a deadline or anything.’

Carlile nods in agreement, sticking his hand into the pile of hot chips as seagulls squawk and come fluttering in to wait for something to come their way. ‘You’re probably right. You can’t take the chook out the oven before it’s ready.’

Matilda chuckles. ‘You and your cooking metaphors.’

So they put the rent search on hold. In the meantime, Carlile’s hands give life to platters upon platters of culinary creations for Christmas parties and lunches, half of which they dip their fingers into, and end up getting carried away with sampling for themselves until later, much to false gasps of shock, there’s nothing left of the food but the swallowed calories blowing their stomachs out to spherical versions of themselves.

‘Look at your tummy!’ Matilda giggles, cheeks flushing with hot tingles as she lifts Carlile’s shirt to pat and pinch the layer of softness covering his full belly. The roll of flesh between her fingers feels detectably thicker than it did last month. ‘You’re getting pudgier, mister Carl…’

‘You can talk,’ he teases. Eyes glued to his phone, he swats her hand down – which makes her knuckle scrape across the side of his belly, sending a flurry of little ripples through his chub.

‘Yeah, well, ***, I’m losing this weight anyway. I told you that already.’

He scoffs silently, eyeing the bulge of full, creamy pudge escaping from the lower seam of her shirt, which she is refusing to acknowledge.

‘Well then you better give me the rest of that,’ he says, scrolling his phone and gesturing to the plate of Christmas cake beside her thigh. Lifting his eyes to the emptied plates and trays surrounding them, he twists his lips. ‘I… I can’t believe we just did that. Now I have to make it all over again.’

‘But it was so good, wasn’t it?’

‘You weren’t lying, were you…?’ he observes, looking into her eyes with a quizzical, bemused expression.

‘What do you mean? About what?’

‘You really are going to make me chubby.’

‘Chubby?’ Her eyes widen on the verge of mania. ‘You better be careful if you think I’m going to make you “chubby”. Look at this thing!’ Taking his shirt and lifting it even higher than it already is, she bends over the roll of her own stuffed stomach and reaches out towards his belly with both hands to clutch it, holding two rolls of flesh either side of his belly button. She gives it a shake, then lets it go so that the parcel of blubber can bounce up and down, as if that helps deliver her point. ‘I think you’ve run a bit past “chubby”, babe.’ She touches his forearm and gives it a loving squeeze. ‘I’m making sure you’re never hungry. That’s all. That’s what I want. If you’re ever feeling the slightest bit hungry, I need you to tell me, okay?’

He gives her a cheeky look out the corner of his eye. ‘I might be… a little bit hungry.’ He pats his belly, which projects out from his frame, round and engorged, with far too many calories already.

‘Well that’s not good enough, then, is it? Here, let’s see if we can get it any bigger.’ She takes the plate of Christmas cake in one hand, a spoon in the other, and cuts mouthfuls off the corners, dipping them in cream and feeding them one by one into his open mouth.

. . .