At least he used to love these things. His eating was now largely mechanical and joyless. It was the sugar and the fat he needed, though it gave him little pleasure. More often than not it made the cravings worse. He hated people using the phrase “comfort eating.” He had not been comfortable for a very long time, except sometimes in dreams where he ran and swam, and from which he occasionally woke up weeping.
He was twenty-eight years old and weighed thirty-seven stone.
There was a creased and sun-bleached photograph of him at nine, standing in the corridor outside the Burnside flat wearing his new uniform for the first day at St. Jude’s. His mother had run back inside at the last minute to get the camera, as if she’d feared he might not be coming home again and had wanted a memento, or a picture to give to the police. He’d been wearing grey flannel shorts and a sky-blue Aertex shirt. He could still smell the damp, fungal carpet and hear the coo and clatter of the pigeons on the window ledge. He remembered how overweight he felt, even then. Whenever he looked at the photo, however, his first thought was what a beautiful boy he had been. So he stopped looking at the photo. He dared not tear it up for fear of invoking some terrible voodoo. Instead he asked one of his care assistants to put it on top of a cupboard where he couldn’t reach it.
Three weeks before his tenth birthday his father disappeared overnight to live in Wrexham with a woman whose name Bunny was never allowed to know. At supper he was there, by breakfast he had gone. His mother was a different person afterwards, more brittle, less kind. Bunny believed that she blamed him for his father’s departure. It seemed entirely possible. His father played cricket. As a young man he’d had a trial for Gloucestershire. He was very much not the parent of an overweight, unathletic child.
To Bunny’s surprise he wasn’t bullied at St. Jude’s. Mostly the other children ignored him, understanding perhaps that isolation was both the cruellest and the easiest punishment they could inflict. His friend Karl said, “I’m sorry. I can only talk to you outside school.” Karl was a wedding photographer now and lived in Derby.
Bunny had kissed three girls. The first was drunk, the second, he learnt later, had lost a bet. The third, Emma Cullen, let him put his hand inside her knickers. He didn’t wash it for a week. But she was chubby and he was aroused and disgusted and utterly aware of his own hypocrisy, and the tangle in his head when he was with her was more painful than the longing when he wasn’t so he cold-shouldered her until she walked away.
He scraped through a business diploma from the CFE then worked for five years as an assistant housing officer for the county council until he was no longer able to drive. His GP said, “You are slowly killing yourself,” as if this had not occurred to Bunny before. He took a job in university admin, digitising paper records, but he was getting larger and increasingly unwell. He had a series of gallstones and two bouts of acute pancreatitis. He had his gall bladder removed but his weight made the operation more traumatic and the recovery harder than it should have been. Sitting was uncomfortable and standing made him feel faint so he lay down at home and after four weeks of statutory sick pay he got a letter telling him not to return to work. His sister, Kate, said it was illegal and maybe she was right but he was tired and in pain and he felt increasingly vulnerable outside the house so he applied for Disability Living Allowance.
His sister said a lot of things that were meant to be helpful, over the phone from Jesmond mostly and very occasionally in person. She had married a man with a red Audi RS3 who owned three wine bars. They had two children and a spotless house which Bunny had seen only in pictures.
Bunny’s few friends began to drift away. For a brief period his most frequent visitor was a bear of a man from the local Baptist church who was charming and funny until it became clear that Bunny was not going to see the light, at which point he too was gone.
Bunny had visited his mother every fortnight since he left home, though she had always given the impression that it was she who was doing him the favour, stepping off the merry-go-round of her busy life to make tea, feed him biscuits and chat. She worked in the Marie Curie shop and had an allotment. At fifty-seven she had started internet dating using a public terminal at the library and lightly dropped so many different names into the conversation that he didn’t know whether she was promiscuous or picky or whether no one stuck around after the second date. Despite the two miles between them she had come to his house over the past few years only when he was bedbound after his three visits to hospital. Now he couldn’t keep her away. She collected his benefit and spent most of it on his weekly shop. She made him eat wholemeal bread and green beans and sardines. She said, “I’m going to save your life.”
Once a week, using a walking frame, he made an expedition to the Londis at the end of the street where he bought a bag of sugar and a slab of butter. He left the butter out till it softened then mixed the two into a paste and ate it over three or four sittings. He would have done it every day if he had more money and cared less about what Mrs. Khan and her son thought of him.
Bunny’s paternal grandfather had been a policeman before the Second World War. He joined the 6th Armoured Division and was burnt to death in his Matilda II tank during the run for Tunis in December 1942. Bunny had a library of books and DVDs about the North Africa Campaign. He read biographies of Alexander and Auchinleck, Rommel and von Arnim. He made ferociously accurate military dioramas, sharing photos and tips and techniques with other enthusiasts around the world on military modelling forums: filters, pre-washing, pin-shading, Tamiya buff dust spray…
He watched porn sometimes. He didn’t like images of lean men with big cocks which served only to make him acutely aware of his own body’s shortcomings. He preferred pictures and videos of solitary women masturbating. He liked to imagine that he had found a hole in the wall of a shower cubicle or a dormitory.
He had thrush in the folds between his gut and his thighs. His joints were sore, which might or might not have been the beginnings of arthritis. His ankles were swollen by lymphoedema. He had diabetes for which he took Metformin every morning. God alone knew what his blood pressure was. He ate Rennies steadily throughout the day to counteract his stomach reflux. Moving from room to room made him breathless. He had fallen badly climbing the stairs a while back, dislocating his knee and giving himself a black eye on the newel post so he slept now on a fold-out sofa in what had previously been the dining room, and used the toilet beside the kitchen. Carers came in to give him a bed bath twice a week.
Sometimes the kids on the estate threw stones at his windows or put dog shit through the letter box. For a period of several weeks one of them with some kind of developmental problem stood with his face pressed to the glass. Bunny would shut the curtains and open them half an hour later only to find that the boy was still standing there.
He played Rome Total War and Halo. He watched daytime television—The Real Housewives of Orange County, Kojak, Homes Under the Hammer…He spent a great deal of time simply looking out of the window. He couldn’t see much — the backs of the houses on Erskine Close, mainly, and the top corner of next door’s Carioca motorhome. But in between, on clear days, there was a triangle of moorland. If the weather was good he watched the shadows of cloud moving across the grass and gorse and heather and imagined that he was one of the buzzards who sometimes came off the hills and drifted over the edge of town.
On the mantelpiece there were photos of Kate’s children, his niece and nephew, Debbie and Raylan, blonde, washed-out, borderline albino, in generic grey-blue cardboard frames with thin gold borders and fold-out stands at the back. He hadn’t seen them in seven years and did not expect to see them again for a long time. Next to the photos was a small wooden donkey with two baskets of tiny oranges slung across its back, a memento of his only foreign holiday, in Puerto de Sóller, when he was nineteen.