‘No cops,’ she whispered to me, ‘no ambulance. Can you get me into your shop?’
Why was she asking me? Well, it wasn’t the first time we’d met, was it?
It’s not at all like me to help somebody. My gut instinct is to keep out of the way of other people’s needs and wants. I live by a policy of non-intervention: I don’t want to send in ground troops and never be able to get them out. So I was already out of my comfort zone when Nasreen’s dad, Sathnam, helped me carry the Goth into Payless, depositing her at the foot of the stairs to my flat.
She was slumped and I wondered if she was losing consciousness. I put my arms around her neck and tried to hoist her up the stairs like a body in a life jacket – me being the life jacket.
She grimaced, pushed her head to one side. ‘I can’t breathe …’
‘You think you’ve got problems,’ I said, panting.
I was forced to change position. I tried the bridal lift and let me tell you, it required Herculean strength to get all 20 stone of me and all of her up those stairs. Each step was a heaving stomp, the kind Frankenstein’s monster would take. At the top, once the front door was flung open (and that was a world of pain, her propped against the wall while I fumbled for my keys), I pitched towards the sofa and deposited her down on it with some force.
I collapsed to my knees, panting, then looked up at Tony, there on the wall, and crossed myself – I don’t know why, I figured it’s what he would have wanted – and said, ‘Sweet Jesus, Tony, I hope she doesn’t die on me. Not in my flat.’
She didn’t die.
She slept. For a couple of hours, as it goes. Then she seemed to come round, though her eyes were still closed, and she shook her head from side to side, saying ‘They’re coming to get me. They’re going to get me.’
I gave Tony a look, which said, ‘We’ve got a right one here.’ Because there’s only one thing worse than a Goth, and that’s a paranoid Goth. A Goth with conspiracy theories.
Why did she pick me? Well, she’d been coming into my shop for a few months, since the heatwave last summer. I recognised a kindred spirit because despite it being 30 degrees, she wore a long-sleeve black T-shirt, black trousers with all manner of rips and rivets, and DM boots. I, too, was clad from my wrists to my ankles and nearly dying in the heat. Anyone who is fat will recognise the reluctance to bare flesh, even in tropical temperatures. Perhaps it wasn’t flab she was covering up – impossible to know the state of her physique under all that garb – and anyway, who knows why Goths keep it under wraps? But I nodded at her capacious sleevage and said, ‘Sweltering, isn’t it? Still, nice day for Lambrini, that’ll be ￡2.50 please,’ and handed her bottle of sweet pear wine back to her across the counter. It was to be a couple more weeks before she said a word to me.
At first it was just a faint, ‘Hiya,’ from under a canopy of kohl black eye pencil. Then, come September, she shivered, and said, ‘Season’s turning.’ Quite the poet.
She always bought Lambrini – the drunkard’s tipple of choice. Even the millionaire bloke who invented Lambrini drank himself to death, cheap and swift. I assumed she was taking it to a bench in Kilburn Grange, to join the other winos congregating there. They sit slumped, talking shite, seeping piss, and watching the ladies in hijabs on the outdoor gym equipment.
Then, about a month before the incident that flattened her in front of the Payless Food & Wine (so this would’ve been October), she came into the shop swaying, approached the counter with her bottle as usual, and promptly sank to the floor. I leaned over it, said, ‘Are you all right?’ but there was no response.
She was out cold.
I dragged her to the back of the shop, where there’s a frayed old armchair (which I’ll be honest, doesn’t smell too good) and allowed her to sober up out there. So by the time the accident happened in November, we were quite close really.
So, back to her being out cold on my sofa: she was sleeping and sleeping, perhaps working off months of the Lambrini in her system, perhaps recovering from whatever damage the car had done when it hit her. For a time, I moved around her laid-out body in the lounge, sort of wafting in and out, clattering a bit, washing things up, hanging some laundry in the box room – generalised fussing which got louder the more I wanted her to wake up. I began wondering if it would be all right to leave her on her own or if it was all a ruse and she’d leap up and steal all my stuff the minute my back was turned. The more time went on, the more unlikely this seemed – perhaps I got used to her and so feared the stranger in her less. I went downstairs and opened up the shop, thinking that she couldn’t leave the flat without passing me at the till. Things were pretty quiet. I popped up a few times to check on her, but nothing.
It was kind of boring waiting for her to wake up, so I had this idea that I should go and buy her a towelling robe for when she came round. She’d be wanting a bath, I reasoned, and you can’t step out of a nice hot bath and immediately Goth yourself up, can you? It’s quite mad what you think of when you’re out of your comfort zone, and someone being in my flat was way out of my comfort zone.
I could have gone to Primark which is right by the Payless on the Kilburn High Road, but I’m quite tight by nature, and what the fuck was I doing buying a complete stranger a bathrobe anyway? So I headed to the British Heart Foundation shop by Argos.
I’ll tell you the most annoying thing about being fat – the weight! No, I mean the actual weight: carrying it around. Walking anywhere does me in. If you’re not heavy, you cannot imagine what it feels like for your limbs to pull you down with every step. Imagine lifting pillars of concrete each time you place a step. Imagine gravity being such a force in your life that you’re pulling against it with every movement. That’s what it’s like being me. I’m lugging myself places. Before I’d even crossed the road outside Poundland, I was out of puff.
I got this bathrobe – pink, a bit scratchy but serviceable – in the British Heart Foundation shop. I know she would have liked a black one, being a Goth, but how many black towelling bathrobes do you see in the shops? I like looking in charity shops, browsing, but I can never find anything to fit – everything’s tiny. I see it as evidence that everyone else is expanding, too. I am not alone, if the charity shops are anything to go by – full of size 8s and 10s, but no lovely roomy upper sizes. No one’s shedding the size 20s as far as I can see, because taking weight off? It’s easier to broker peace in Syria or get to grips with quantitative easing.
Once I got into the flat, I was surprised to see the sofa empty and I looked at Tony, as if to say, ‘What’ve you done with her?’ I thought I was stuck with a size 10 towelling robe which I wouldn’t even be able to get one arm into, but then she appeared, her face seeming bruised from sleep, her hair matted to one side of her head.