The Tale of the Passionate People Eater
Caitlin danced, hiding fear behind a flash of pearly teeth and a twirl of copper hair. Tonight, the bad stuff stayed inside her head, along with the past. Outside was Cathy Curves, proud to be big!
She writhed and made snake shapes with her hands. "Wooooo!" Bella tottered across the stage, a vision in glitter and leopard skin. The audience, all teeth and neon-luminescence, screamed their approval.
Out came Jemima, clad tonight in black leather. The spotlight swept to illuminate the new arrival and, but for the flame of her red hair, Caitlin all but vanished into the background. A scrum broke out and Jemima wobbled away, avoiding the sudden out-thrust of hands. "Oi, give over!" she scowled, kicking away some of the more over-zealous punters.
The crowd whooped. They crowed. They snarled. But they reserved the best for last. That one final ecstasy.
On she came, striding across the stage, parting the miasma of cigarette smoke with the sheer magnitude of her bulk. Donna was the most voluminous; the ultimate in blonde glamour and her fans adored her. Accordingly, they unleashed their ultimate ovation. Shot glasses rattled on their shelves, bulbs in spotlights quivered and punters standing clear of the throng stuck fingers in their ears.
Afterward, Caitlin felt like a used car, but the job prevailed and they were led outside by the local press for a photo opportunity.
Donna and Jemima grappled for centre-stage, Jemima winning by a belly when the shutter finally clicked.
"Whose the new girl?" a seasoned slime-bag from the local rag, gestured toward Caitlin.
"This is Cathy Curves" Bella gave Caitlin a bear-crushing hug, "lovely in't she."
"If you say so," the photographer sneered.
Afterward, Caitlin recalled it as the single most humiliating part of the day.
"How'd you find it then?" Bella asked later.
"Terrifying," Caitlin told the truth and the troupe dissolved with laughter.
"You ain't wrong. My first time I threw up all over the front row. You remember that Donna? All over the front row?"
Donna leaned forward then, excluding everything, focusing on Caitlin, "you just remember, there's nothin' wrong with bein' cuddly. Plenty of blokes like a curvy lady."
The night was young and growing younger, but not for Caitlin. She felt drained and wanted nothing more than home, normality, her shop, her flat and a comfortable chair. Besides, she had to remember her health. She didn't want to overdo it. So making her excuses, she left them guzzling tequilas on the terrace of Belushi's.
Walking along the bay road, gazing out toward surfers working the last breakers of the day, something caught her eye. A flint of reflected light in the sand between sea and promenade. Litter was commonplace on the beach in summer but for some reason Caitlin sensed this was something different.
She picked her way down to the sand, the warm grains reassuring between her toes, reminding her of sunny days and her father building sand castles. A broad-shouldered surfer was already hovering near the spot when Caitlin arrived. She could see something lying in the sand at his feet. He hadn't even noticed. One step forward and he'd stub his toe. But he was looking right at her and she held his gaze in turn, willing him not to look down.
"Did you see it?"
"See... it?"
"Lightning for sure, or something" He was Australian, trademark dizzy and typically cute. Caitlin found herself replying with a dainty shrug. In her mind's eye she saw herself as he saw her. Girl-mountain, yards of flesh, bubble chin, dappled cheeks, moles and... 'Nothing wrong with being cuddly. Plenty of blokes like a curvy lady.' Not this one, Caitlin was willing to bet.
"I didn't see lightning," she stammered, gesturing vaguely toward a sky streaked with the crimson onset of dusk, "you'd need a storm for lightning."
"Yeah" the surfer chuckled, and "weird." then he was gone, padding back toward the surf.
Caitlin dropped to her knees before the object and the sandy crater it occupied, watched in a strange, disconnected fashion as her own plump hands reached out and touched it. It, the thing, looked like nothing she'd ever seen before, round like a ball and half buried. Covered in irregular cavities, like frilly mouths. The comparison prompted a quick withdrawal of her fingers and a sharp intake of breath. Was it some kind of sea creature?
Silly. She chided herself and reached out again. Traced the valleys and paths between cavities with her fingertips. It felt cold, and smooth, like polished stone, or glazed clay.
Whatever it was, she liked it and wanted it. A cursory glance revealed no wandering artist, searching for his lost creation, so she took it, excavating it with no great difficulty then hiding it in the folds of her dress.
As she climbed the steps to the promenade she heard the surfer calling out, but ignored him. If he wanted it, he should have said before. Too late now. Much too late. The thing belonged to Caitlin.
...
Home was a flat situated above her father's old toy shop. These days the shop was a novelty store; a tourist haunt, which she ran with the help of her sister Jocelyn. Once the talk of Newquay, it was now little more than a building full of memories. If Caitlin concentrated, she could hear her father's laughter, see the sparkle in his eye as he watched a customer swoon over his latest creation. Wooden trains, sail boats, matchstick aeroplanes and tin soldiers. Charming. Simple. Beautiful.
The novelty store didn't compare. Jocelyn lacked her father's sense of fun and preferred cheap over substance, but she possessed a daunting business sense and for this reason the sisters agreed early on that Jocelyn should take over the management side of things. So while she sourced stock, kept the books and managed the bankroll, Caitlin manned the till.
Not now though. Now was down-time and Caitlin's feet ached, her scar throbbed. She put
the thing from the beach on a table and flopped on the couch. There she lay, gazing at the enigma and wondering.
As ornaments went, it didn't quite fit with the decor, and she knew what Jocelyn would say when she saw it.
Later she found herself sitting in front of the telephone, struggling with inner demons. In one hand a note saying 'you did good, Donna was impressed - call us later, Bella' and in the other a pamphlet for a local weight loss club. The slogan on the front cover read 'Decide Today, New You Tomorrow!" Jocelyn's idea. A way to get back into shape. Back to the old Caitlin.
...
The child pranced and clapped his hands, all excitement, exuberance and shining eyes.
The mother, a tiny woman, gave Caitlin an encouraging smile, so Caitlin picked up the widget, turned the key a few times and released it. Twin rotors buzzed into life and the thing rose jerkily into the air. The boy clapped and beamed. The mother chuckled.
"It's five ninety nine," Caitlin said, feeling stupid when she realised the mother couldn't understand a word. She counted off the price on her fingers. The mother nodded, but Caitlin could tell she had no intention of buying the toy.
She was about to pluck the widget out of the air when she found herself face to face with the father. He looked angry, or disapproving.
At first Caitlin thought his expression was aimed at the flying robot, but then she realised his eyes were on her.
Slowly, deliberately, his unflattering gaze travelled the length of her body and he sneered. Before bustling his family out of the store, the man glanced back and barked something in Japanese.
Caitlin knew she should react, perhaps in the way Donna might, as a powerful, confident, curvy lady, proud of her girth. Happy with the flab. Instead, she just stood while ice filled her veins and heat flushed her cheeks.
"He said you're too fat, a disgrace to society," Jocelyn barged past, carrying a large box of novelty whoopee cushions.
"Finally got that diploma in foreign languages you always wanted?" Caitlin gazed into the middle-distance, tone flat. She felt sick.
"Rise above it, that'd be my advice." Jocelyn plonked the box down on the floor. "Caitlin, this stripping business. Dad would be mortified!"
"It helps," somewhere at the back of Caitlin's mind a voice was niggling. "The money helps."
"Sleazy help. All those perverts looking at your..." a hand swept the air, encompassing all things Caitlin. It was a big gesture, "bits and bobs. I could understand it, maybe, before... I mean, you were always... but now?"
"There's nothing wrong with being cuddly!" Caitlin screamed.
Jocelyn staggered backward, tripped over the box and crashed to the floor. She lay there, legs akimbo, eyes wide with shock and gibbered, "Jesus Caitlin!"
--
She sat alone, cradling the ornament in her lap, stroking in an absent minded way. The phone lay nearby. Two pieces of paper.
She stared at the phone, and in her mind the receiver morphed, the visage of Mr Japanese. The angry buzz of the widget filled her ears. "A disgrace to society huh?"
"What did one disgusting amorphous blob say to the other disgusting amorphous blob?"
Caitlin's breath caught in her throat. She leapt to her feet, the ball tumbling from her lap, landing with a soft sound. It looked different, strange, organic. The cavities were moving; working like myriad mouths; like a grounded fish gulping down air. The ball rotated of its own volition, showing a previously hidden swelling. As she watched, two lids peeled open to reveal a pearlescent eye, slimed with a film of milky goo. A multitude of root-like tentacles were unfolding. Bile was rising in Caitlin's throat.
"Come on, it's not a rhetorical question."
Some kind of trick. A practical joke. "Jocelyn?" Her lungs were deflating, all energy drained. A dead battery, vulnerable and flat.
"Guess again."
"What.. what is this?"
"Don't you know a joke when you hear one?" The tentacles were combining to form a trunk, elevating the ball. Caitlin glanced toward the living room and, in her mind's eye, the front door. Escape.
"There's somebody at the door. I have to go let them in." It seemed like a reasonable thing to say. A decent lie for a tentacled phantasm. Forcing herself not to look at the thing, Caitlin strode into the living room, across what suddenly seemed like a vast expanse of floor. She reached for the door handle.
"I can make you thin again."
She stopped, hand in mid-turn. She could hear the tentacles squelching as they propelled the thing into the room behind her.
"How?" She heard herself. Her voice, joining a waking nightmare in conversation.
"Pick me up and I'll show you."
Caitlin recalled the beach, the compunction to investigate, to hold the thing, to cherish it. She remembered the surfer, imagined his hands on the object in the sand, his triumph over her failure. "I don't want to pick you up," She span, pressing her back to the door, forcing herself to look. The eye rolled in its socket. "My God. You're..."
"Disgusting? Yes, I know."
"You said you could make me thin again?"
"Pick me up and I'll show you."
"I can't pick you up! The very thought makes me want to puke!"
"I'm beautiful. I'm disgusting. Are you always so capricious?"
"You've changed! How could I find you beautiful now?"
"Have you truly learned nothing about beauty, Caitlin? It's in the eye of the Beholder. Now quit your whining and pick me up."
She swallowed hard, her gut squirming as she moved away from the door, hands trembling, lips dry.
"There you go."
She hunkered down, that single eye coming level with her face. She could feel its warmth, smell vile sulphurous breath emitting from fifty different mouths. Worst of all she could sense its quivering need. "What are you?" She whispered.
"You'll see. Now pick me up!"
Hands reached out, as they had done on the beach. Moving with a mind of their own, or something else's. Fingers touched and her throat spasmed. She held a ball of acid puke in her mouth then swallowed. The eye swivelled. The mouths worked. Her hands closed around its hideous bulk and she picked it up.
"I'm surprisingly light for my size. You might say I'm just big boned. Now take me to your breast for long have I hungered."
Caitlin concentrated on her breathing, on staying conscious. The room behind the thing was spinning now, but that was all background.
Just background.
--
"There's something different about you" Jocelyn said the next day, and the day after that. And indeed there was. Caitlin had made her decision. Her step carried a lightness and a confidence previously smothered by the heft of her body and the weight of her guilt. The pounds were falling off, in both respects.
"I've quit the Busty Bubbles," she announced.
"I'm glad," Jocelyn embraced her, stood back and admired. "You joined the class I take it- the pamphlet I gave you? It'll be hard work, Cait, but you stick with it. There are no quick fixes."
"No pain no gain huh. Sorry Joss. This is all my own work. I didn't call the class."
"Really?" Jocelyn blinked away surprise, "sorry. That's great. Really. You look great."
Caitlin looked nonplussed. Insults veiled in compliments. "I love you too Joss."
Jocelyn paused in her work, but only briefly. Caitlin could hear the smile in her voice, "while we're on the subject of aesthetics, maybe you could tell me what that thing is in the flat?"
Something fluttered through Caitlin's stomach and latched itself around her spine. She pictured the moment. Pulsating, slime drooling, tentacles dangling and Jocelyn staring. "You saw it?"
"Could hardly miss it sitting right there on the table. What is it, glazed clay? You've been to St Ives again. You know those artists are all pot-heads. You give them money and they just smoke it away."
"It's mine."
"Maybe, but it's horrible. I brought it down. You can have it on display down here if you must, but I'm not living with it." She pointed toward the store room.
"Jocelyn, you... shouldn't have brought that thing down here."
"Ha. Had it just where you wanted it did you? God Caitlin. You might be getting thinner but your taste in crap hasn't improved any."
--
Days passed. The weight continued to fall from Caitlin while the thing distended in turn. It approved of its new home on the counter. People stroked it, admired it, commented. They only ever saw the polished Cornish sculpture. Caitlin only ever saw the bloated, pulsing blob.
Some weeks after Jocelyn's discovery, after hours, in the dark, Caitlin asked, "why can't others see you the way I see you?"
"You've heard of 'I think therefore I am?'"
"Sure."
"Others are of the opinion that I am a piece of Cornish sculpture, and objectivity is a powerful thing."
"Am I going mad?"
"Many things seem senseless. You must form your own opinion in order to make wisdom of flawed objectivity. Now be silent child, and let me make you thinner."
--
The day of blood marked a down-turn in Caitlin's personal timeline. The slime-bag from the local paper came to the store. He recognised her immediately and she recognised him. "Well, well, well. If it isn't Cathy Curves. What 'appened to you gal? D'you get cancer or sommat? Ain't seen you on stage since that one time."
The thing was larger than ever, tentacles thick as branches, covered in a forest of vicious barbs. The eye was sharper, faster to latch onto movement in the shop. Its mouths were filled with row upon row of sharp pointed teeth.
The tentacles lashed out first, peeling back a neat triangle of skin on the man's temple, revealing bone and sinew. Then the mouths worked their magic. Tearing, sucking...
"No!" Caitlin could only stand and watch. Iced veins again. The flush of heat around her face. And bile. Always bile.
It went on, and the scream was inhuman, endless, less a cry of fear, more a venting of life. When it died, the silence was abrupt. The slime-bag was gone. Most of him was gone.
Jocelyn was away, thank God. Caitlin had the rest of the day to close shop and mop up. She couldn't clean slime-bag out of everything, and some of the toys had small working parts, easily clogged - so she invented a story, took money from the register and threw away the damaged stock. There'd been a hold up. The thieves had taken cash and a bunch of toys. Probably kids. They hid their faces.
"Wish they'd taken that bloody horrible clay thing too," Jocelyn would say later, giving the thing an unfriendly prod.
--
The police came, as Caitlin knew they would, searched the shop, questioned her, and Jocelyn at length. The man in charge - DI Burnside was his name - commented slyly on Caitlin's demeanour, asked after her health, insinuating drug abuse perhaps. The thing remained in place on the shop counter, bloated and wheezing vile vapours into the store, wreathing the policemen in grey mist.
It was Jocelyn who mentioned the operation. Told of her concerns for Caitlin's weight loss, her 'erratic behaviour'. She even brought up the Busty Bubbles. Burnside seemed interested.
"Erratic behaviour?"
The store was closed, Caitlin and Jocelyn confined to the flat while police scoured every inch of the ground floor. Alone, with her sister, watched closely by a female officer, Caitlin fidgeted while Jocelyn stared into the distance, "Dad's probably turning in his grave."
Caitlin couldn't speak. The pith of her soul writhed, aching to crawl out of the hole it was in. Her thoughts were for her father too. His beautiful shop, a scene of carnage. She found her voice, small and terrified. "They always said he created beautiful things".
Jocelyn patted Caitlin's hand. "They were right."
The front door opened and DI Burnside stepped into the room. A pall of grey smoke and the smell of cordite followed, preceding three men dressed in body armour and helmets. They were heavily armed with machine guns and moved as those trained to behave like living weapons are wont to move. "I'll take over from here Judy," Burnside informed the female officer.
A pregnant exchange of silence passed between them, while the police woman seemed to calculate her response. Finally she gave a curt nod, "you sure sir?"
"Sure."
She left, pushing past the three men
who were now examining every part of the room, left right and centre.
"What the hell is this?" Jocelyn sounded ferocious, but Caitlin recognised the tremor in her voice.
"We've found something," Burnside sounded like he was recounting a tale so absurd even he knew it made him sound like an idiot. He sat down heavily and lit a cigarette.
"You can't smoke in..." Jocelyn began, but thought better of it when she saw the look on his face.
"Who are these men?" Caitlin frowned.
Burnside seemed to freeze. Slowly, he inhaled on the cigarette, eyes closing. "We know two things, Caitlin. Firstly, we know about Ray Meer. Local journalist. He was seen coming in here. Nobody saw him leave. We spoke with your friends, the...uuh" he studied some scrawl in a notebook, "Busty Bubbles? They confirmed Ray said a few nasty things to you, last time you met."
To Caitlin's astonishment, one of the heavily armed men took a step forward.
"I'm Agent Body, Anthony Body" he had a gentle voice. His eyes seemed to shine in the cordite mist.
"Ministry of Defence. We're here for the thing."
"You know about that?" Caitlin shivered.
Jocelyn gaped at her sister. "You know what he's talking about? Who the hell is Ray Meer, Caitlin?"
"We've been tracking its movements," Agent Body replied, as if this explained everything.
"We're here to help."
"The other thing we know," Burnside went on, ignoring Body, "is that you had an operation...uuh," again the notepad, "seven months ago. Removal of a lump," he tapped his own head, meaning Caitlin's. "A tumour, no?"
Jocelyn put an arm around Caitlin. Her voice was borderline hysterical, "I told her to take it easy. She wouldn't listen. She never listens!"
Burnside stubbed out the cigarette. "Caitlin, is there anything you want to tell me?"
"I killed him didn't I? The man from the paper. Ray Meer? It was me." Caitlin was looking at Agent Body.
Jocelyn dissolved, melting and broken. Burnside grabbed her before she could slip from her chair.
The room was spinning. Caitlin grasped the table, a link to reality. "And the thing? What is it?"
"We're not sure," Agent Body remained calm, impassive. He shook his head, shouldered his weapon and sat in the only remaining free chair. In the background Jocelyn, Burnside and the flat were blurring into a sudden frenzy of sickening motion. The other two armed men seemed to levitate in the midst of the kaleidoscope.
"A metaphor probably. Certainly representative of something. A lump, we think."
"Another tumour?"
"Yes, Caitlin. Another tumour."
--
Bright lights. White and stark. An empty mist and an endless voice calling her. Always calling her.
Time had passed, and time, they say, is a healer. But the talents of time were limited in this respect and in the meantime, Caitlin slept.
"Burnside calls it mitigating circumstances. You weren't yourself. The lawyers think this will be taken into consideration." Jocelyn, eyes rimmed red, face pale as ash, was sitting next to Caitlin's hospital bed. "Ray Meer, it turns out, had his fingers in all kinds of pies. Drugs, prostitution. A real nasty piece of work. In some ways," she laughed, but the laugh was dry and humourless, "you did society a favour."
Caitlin's eyes were closed. Her face bruised and pinched by bandaging.
"So there's really plenty to come back for sis." Jocelyn's voice caught in her throat, snagged on pain. "Me. For one."
She talked some more. Read a little. Dozed and finally awoke as the nurses were calling an end to visiting hours for that day. She kissed Caitlin and touched her gently on the hand, just as she had many times before. Just as she would again.
When she was gone and the room plunged into darkness, Caitlin slept alone.
Alone but for the glazed-clay sculpture decorating a table on the far side of the room.
A surprise... for when she woke up.
