Chapter 1

~ M A T I L D A S W A P S G O A L S | a w e i g h t g a i n s t o r y ~




p a r t o n e : a small taste




Some of us have a need we know nothing of until it’s too late. In the meantime, it screams through our being, and our behaviour screams in echo.

She was able to ignore its presence on her body for a small time. That is until exactly three and a half months ago, when Matilda Nolasco’s little cousin had, all in babyish innocence, decided to point out the problem area while five relatives sat chatting in the TV room. Five-year-old little Allison had just taken a break from climbing all over her dad’s lap, harassing him for a fourth packet of Barbeque flavoured chips while the uncles sat around the TV speculating on the current English Premier League season. Caught in a yawn, Matilda had stretched her arms out high above her head as she sat on the sofa, then slouched back down with her shirt settling a bit too high up on her belly. It was too late, then. A small over-spill of flesh, soft as a baby’s bottom, had been laid bare to outside eyes. Seeing an opportunity for mindless mischief, Allison tittered, sent out a curious finger, and poked Matilda right in the tiny roll her belly had created. She had swatted Allison’s little hand away and yanked her shirt back down faster than she could tell Allison never to do that again in a voice she wished didn’t sound so hurt.

Sensing his daughter’s discomfort, Martino Nolasco laughed his heavy-bellied laugh and patted his own beer gut, which had been developing into something rather round, and a touch too large for his button up shirt with each decade that had gone by in his life. He grabbed Allison’s attention with a whistle and a wink. ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ he bragged, looking down his nose at the little girl with a mocking, sly eye. ‘Bet you’ve ever seen a belly like this!’ and with that, took his round gut up in his hands and chortled like Santa Claus cradling his sack of presents.

‘Ew!’ Allison screeched, fleeing in a jetstream of squealing laughter to rejoin the other kids, who were running amok down the other end of uncle Grant’s house with beaten-up Nerf guns and Bratz dolls whose legs were falling off.

Matilda knew her dad had once again come to her rescue and led her out of an awkward situation by sacrificing his own dignity. She tried to persist with watching the television screen, as if nothing had happened. But there was this slow, simmering embarrassment sitting in her sternum that just wouldn’t go away. It wrapped itself around her thoughts, permeating into the grooves of her consciousness like ink. And just like that, with such a simple and innocuous sequence of events, Matilda was to mark the first time in her life she had ever been conscious of being self-conscious — about her stomach. The feeling was strange and new. It was as if she’d never thought about that part of her before, never been aware of its existence as such, as a part of her body, something attached to her. Now, it was all she could think about to keep from losing herself to the influence of a burning anxiety that hung around her chest like a bad smell.

The television, then, had displayed to her a disconnected sequence of images and incongruous meaningless sounds until, at last, pushed to her limit, she had to excuse herself. She got up, sneaked away to the bathroom, locked the door, and glared down at her body to conduct an analysis of it. She knew that she wasn’t allowed to call herself fat. She wasn’t vain or deluded. It would have been an insult to real fat people. Xiaoden Wen from science class; she was kind of fat, maybe shapely on a good day, but quite chubby on a bad one, with sides that poked over the sides of her skirt. She would be insulted at the comparative implication, if she ever heard Matilda’s thoughts floating on the broadcast wavelength of ideas. Oh, and then there was Emelia Clark, who was… enormous. The poor girl had to be at least two-hundred pounds, if you were to speak kindly about it, even though the immensity of her stomach made you want to stare at it until your eyes went dry. She would have broken down in tears over such a comparison.

No, Matilda knew what was really going on. She had developed a runner’s body, and she still had one, even with her gently-flared hips and her teardrop shaped backside — it’s just that she’d lost something definitive about the “athlete’s hardness”. She was a footballer, not a housewife. An endurance runner, not a pornstar, a dedicated, natural athlete who was, everyday of her life, geared into shape for the sport which she dedicated every last one of her waking breaths to.

But at this particular, fateful moment in time, Matilda had stood in front of the mirror in her uncle’s bathroom in shakily-repressed shock, where she pinched a portion of her belly. She released it, observing the subtle differences in its physical behaviour by moving it in different ways and from different angles. Perhaps it was jiggling, but… just a tiny bit. If anything, it was so faint that she wasn’t even sure if she was meant to believe what her eyes were seeing. Her breasts looked unchanged. Or did they? It was too hard to tell. Then she had looked again, closer this time. No — she was being paranoid. They were alright. Her ass looked no different. Hang on. Actually… She tilted her head. No. Yes? She couldn’t tell. Her glutes were meant to be so tight you could see the muscle sinew through her skin. Maybe they did look a little softer today? Or was it the angle, the softness of the light? She twisted back around to face herself. Her belly was the supreme culprit, here, and it felt obvious to her. Even as she tensed the muscles along the core of her waist, which usually stood up like bas-relief carvings, the surface of her stomach had the stubborn appearance of being relaxed when it wasn’t. Which she realised was not right. She stared, then, at a perfectly smooth cushion of flesh sitting smack bang at the centre of her stomach, eliminating all muscle definition in a radius of insubstantiality. When she spread her hand over her hip and ran her fingers down her flank to explore, she discovered some tone had gone missing there as well. She felt her other thigh, giving it a pinch on the inside. There was not much to hold, but she’d only ever been skin-tight anyway.

She had stood up and tried to shake herself off. Maybe she was overtired from training and studying, and her mind was not connecting the correct dots in the right sequence. But this sudden arrival of body fat was all too new and uncharted. She nibbled at her upper lip, with a crease deepening between her brows as she felt a sudden influx of ineffable, unearthly instinct, like the flutter of a message from the future passing against your heart so briefly you barely notice it was there…

“Well”, she said to her mind, all the way back then, before any chapter of her wild future had a chance to unfurl… Well, until this smidge of unwanted tummy pudge shrank back to the nothingness it came from, she would have to pass it off as a “mild bloating problem” to anybody who might ask. “I’m just having strange bloating problems lately,” she would say. “The doctor says it’ll pass soon,” she would declare. “Medically certified. It’ll be fine.”

But, presently, the tummy fat is still there, lurking in a latent sense. Beyond door 33 of the Windomsyde Motel, we find an adolescent Matilda Nolasco slumped across a tan lounge the morning after a long night of liver-poisoning with her graduate classmates. Beneath the rumples of a white shirt, the meagre germinations of a paunch are experimenting with the idea of rising from the onslaught of alcohol and carbohydrates. She has not noticed the threat of the pudge accumulating. Nor does anyone feel the need to mention this new subtle bulge. But the season isn’t quite right for it to fully bloom — not yet, at least.

The month is November, and it is deep in the midst of a teenage festival called “Schoolies”; a time of alcohol, of freedom, of wonky legs, puke gushing from open mouths, shiny silver goonsacks sloshing with wine on the cheap, huge cartons of watery beer poured into beer-bongs so long and ridiculously shaped that nobody could ever hope to chug one whole, the feeling of your bare toes sinking into the sun-heated sand of the shore, empty bottles and boxes populating this golden strip of beach, litter on the streets, piss in the gutters because why not, covert sexual acts behind corners, music from all ends of the beachfront mashing into one amorphous sound in the open air, cigarettes and cigars underfoot, and don’t forget other substances. Food has been aplenty. More than ever before, for some. There’s a vibe of liberation at work, here, of free-floating mindlessness in limbo between the end of youth’s epoch and what will be the long grind until death of what we call “adult life” as a worker. If you’re lucky, you’ll only hate your job. The spectre of responsibility awaits. In these final hours before it arrives for good, the whole dizzy gang is in riot before it all comes crashing down.

Matilda has slowly recovered through the night. She follows her friends out of the beach house and down to the shore. The late morning sun spreads a biting heat through her cheeks. She’s here to feel free, and she knows it, so she takes her shirt off and struts around in a sleek black two-piece, trying to feel confident. She’s not ugly – not the meanest stunner around either, as far as she knows. Two slightly crooked teeth in the corners of her mouth stop her from smiling with too much liberty. A smidge of baby fat still clings to the bones of her cheeks, with some residual acne lingering above her neck…

A boyfriend she once maintained a relationship with outside high school, for all of six months, had tried to tell her she looked like an actress, but even now, she’s still not entirely convinced it’s true. Whenever she looks in the mirror, she sees too much plainness. As simple and unembellished as your average college girl who roams around the mall with her gang of teen friends whenever she’s not at training … all this flavourlessness, in spite of the fact that she’s an Australian citizen of third-generation Portuguese descent. Her father, Martino, is Portuguese, but her mother Jenny is as “Down-Under” as they come. Matilda never seems to be able to explain this combination to anybody. What she is able to do, however, is exude natural talent. Her level of athleticism is obscene for a player in a local league soccer team. She joined the Purple Vale Strikers as a backup as a sixteen year old, and it ruined her chances at a normal life. She’d fallen in true love with the sport. She became like a family member to the club, and she realised she would lay down her life before she let anything happen to it.

As she marches down to the shore, there are six friends beside her, towels and inflatable floaties in hand. Four others have stayed back at the cabins. Jen, a giggly Vietnamese girl who transferred to their school two years ago, stands with her towel bundled in her arms like a teddy bear, clawing the sand with her toes. Amy, Tess, Kiera and Jasmine are your typical white girls with white girl problems and varying shades of blonde dyed hair, but for Liana, a crimson-haired owl of a girl, who just sticks around to observe things as if she never has anything to say. The smell of sunscreen and salt water is in the air. Laughter runs like a bubbling brook.

Suddenly a ball comes arcing across the sky. Matilda is the first to spot it with her instinctive eye. It hits the sand nearby, sending her friends scattering with high-pitched squeals of alarm as an explosion of sand sprays their towels. Matilda gives out an eager little, ‘Oh!’, and glances around to see where it came from. A bunch of topless boys some distance away shuffle awkwardly as they mutter amongst themselves, glancing in Matilda’s direction and wondering how to get their ball back — and maybe is it even possible to chat up some of the girls at the same time? Raising her hand with calm assurance, she says to her friends, ‘Don’t worry, I got this.’

Lining herself up a few steps behind the ball, she steps in with her left foot, trots up, leans forward and swings her right foot down hard. The ball blasts upwards in a downshore arc. Her arms fly up at her sides with the follow-through as she traces the flight of the ball sailing away. When her foot lands back in the sand, an area of her tummy reacts with a fractional, almost invisible bounce. But she doesn’t pay any notice. Not yet.

. . .

At her footballing club, Matilda occupies what is called the “right-mid” or “right-wing” position in her team, occasionally drifting into the centre to operate as a play-maker. It largely depends who’s available from week to week; sometimes she’ll be running more than just about anyone else in her team, bolting up and down the pitch, only to halt almost instantly at breakneck pace with the ball at her feet, keep it from being stolen by an opponent who is thrown off balance, then boot it across to whoever’s making a forward run so they can redirect it past the goalkeeper and into the net. Sometimes you will find her tracking up and down the pitch, boxing in opposition players who are looking to make a daring dash with the ball. Other times, she will roam about like a lioness, eyes wide and pinned to the ball as she reads the movement of all the players on the field and positions herself in areas of space where her teammates can pass the ball through to her, where she will catch it at her feet, pivot on it, and make a zigzagging run towards the goals – the ten-yard zone where any sort of magic might happen.

As a girl on the precipice of thirteen, she’d been far and away her school’s best player. A natural. No understanding yet, no clue how to time her efforts and conserve her energy, but somehow able to wriggle the ball out of a contest and use it no matter what circumstances she found herself in. She proceeded to win small recognitions such as class ribbons, school awards, and eventually state trophies. She was swept into her school district’s youth academy by the age of fifteen, and by the age of sixteen found herself in Purple Vale Strikers, and was winning season titles in the next year by scoring after being subbed on in the last twenty minutes of every match while she “adjusted” to the team. The adjustment didn’t have to last long. By seventeen and eighteen, she was even granted “special leaves of absence” from the High School Board under “pursuance of excellence” grounds so that she could train for competitions.

It isn’t her Portuguese descent that keeps her coaches coming back to ask her to play week after week. Her dedication and skill is enough on its own. She has a winner’s heart, a runner’s body, and a professional’s mind. Her ability to be relied upon has never been under threat.

But all of a sudden her belly, with a hint of a paunch having tip-toed along to settle into the middle of her athletic core, is trying its best to establish roots. It may make its presence known – and felt – if not now, then in time.

. . .