A fat man goes for a run.

It’s a sudden impulse.

One moment it’s not a thought that’s ever occurred to him before. The next moment it’s a thought that has a occurred. More than a thought, an impulse, which must be acted on now.  It's the only thought that matters. It's an all-encompassing thought. Like the Devil in those old stories. One minute he wasn’t there, the next minute, he’d always been there. It seems suddenly that he's always wanted to go for a run, he just didn't realise it before.

All his life he has been overweight, to the extent that it’s been something he barely thinks about. A bouncy baby. A chubby toddler. A small boy with puppy fat. A porky teenager. A fat adult. He’s been these people, and, for the most part, he's been them cheerfully. These were all identities he understood, lives he could inhabit. But now he’s an obese middle aged man.

(That’s the word that’s done it. The word obese. He’s always known he was fat, but he’s never been particularly bothered by it, apart from a few years in his teens. But obese is something else altogether. Obese is medical. Obese implies joint problems, breathing difficulties. It whispers about tubes and procedures. It insinuates an otherness, a not-quite-rightness. And when his phone had downloaded an fitness app with out him asking it to, and when he'd filled in the details because he was a bit bored and maybe doing a fitness app might be fun it had used that word. And so he'd sat back in a sudden daze, wondering what it meant.)

And now, suddenly, as sure as he’s ever been of anything, he feels the need to go for a run. He wants to run until he’s not obese any more. He feels, no, he knows that once he steps out of that front door, that’s it, a new world awaits. He's certain of it. He can taste the future in the thought and it's full of wild promises.

He scrambles up the stairs almost on hands and knees and searches his bedroom for suitable clothing. He’s got trainers, he always wears trainers anyway. He finds a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He finds an AC-DC T-shirt, from when he saw them ten years ago. Pulling it over his shoulders he’s aware that it’s tight, too tight. Anatomically tight.

He looks further, deeper into drawers which are rarely unpacked. He wonders why he has so many clothes, when he wears the same few things most days. He finds a charcoal grey T-shirt. It still has creases in. He wonders when he bought it, or if he did. It’s the sort of neutral, tasteful piece of clothing that his Mum cautiously sends him each birthday, and at Christmas.

It’s loose enough that it provides him with a degree of comfortable coverage. He sighs with relief, the dream still lives. He’s ready, he’s going to go, it’s going to happen.

Almost falling down the stairs in his eagerness to get outside and begin his new life as a runner he gathers himself and takes a deep breath. The front door is a portal to a whole new world. A whole new way of living

If this were a story by Borges, it would happen the way he dreams. He would run and not stop, through day and night, across seas and continents, having countless adventures before arriving, years later, at his front door, transformed. A thin, taut man, weather-beaten but with infinite reserves of wisdom and compassion. He would have inspired others on his route, he would have run with saints, Popes and reality television stars, he would have become a celebrity and then sunk back into obscurity, and still he would have run.

Sadly for him, though, this is not a story by Borges, it’s a story by Matt Fallaize. And what happens is this: after taking an age to decide which direction to run in he starts. Gingerly at first but with increasing confidence. It's a sort of shuffle to start with but, gradually, by degrees, he begins to jog. He runs, no less, he actually runs for all of two hundred yards before, breathless, and with little red stars of pain bursting behind his eyes he clutches a lamp-post and heaves with unspent emotion for the life that’s led him to this point.

That’s not the point of the story of course. The point is that, despite the pain in his hamstrings and calves he tries it again the next day, and the day after that, and he gets gradually better. Two years after that first short, agonising jog he enters a local race and is amazed by all the encouragement he hears from people lining the course as he shyly shuffles round. He is still fat. He is still, technically, obese, but these people don’t seem to mind, they clap him, they cheer him on.

If this were a story by the younger Matt Fallaize, he would suffer a heart attack, or a muscular tear. He would curse himself for ever trying, he would hear the laughter behind the encouragement. Luckily, it’s a story by the older Matt Fallaize, who has hopefully learned a few lessons, and is a little kinder for it. He continues to run and, by increments, gets a little fitter, loses a little weight. He learns to love it, he comes to rely on it and, sometimes, on early mornings when the sky is liminal and the whole world a suggestible commodity, when coveys of grouse take sudden whirring flight, when dew still bends the neck of the fritillaries and mistle thrushes sing in interrupted phrases from the very tops of trees, he experiences feelings which come remarkably close to grace. And that will do, that will do just fine.

 

The other Hulk Hogan

Christened Nicholas, the young Nick Hogan was at primary school in the early nineteen nineties, around the time that satellite dishes began appearing on the sides of the large executive homes that comprised the estate the he lived on. As such, the nickname “Hulk” was pretty much inevitable. He didn’t share the fascination that his classmates had for WWF wrestling, and figure of Hogan, with his blonde moustache and outsized muscles, terrified him.

But, as a shy, quiet boy, and one not prone to answering back, he accepted the name with good grace. Early in life he’d learned the value of self-deprecation, so he didn’t try to fight it. His older sister was a high achiever, a talented musician and an excellent student; she was very much the star of the family, when relatives had finished admiring her achievements and asked him how he was doing at school, he’d always reply “Oh, you know”. His sister, Catherine, also called him Hulk, and smiled at him as she did so. His mother hated the nickname, his father didn’t understand it. As he attended a nearby secondary school with many of his primary classmates, the name followed him all the way into adulthood.

By this time, his introversion had largely taken over his life, to the extent that he couldn’t face taking up the place at University which had been offered to him. The thought of being surrounded by more people his own age, having just spent the last sixteen years surrounded by people his own age, horrified him in a way that he couldn’t properly explain. His parents’ disappointment was palpable but for once he proved intractable.

He took to taking long walks on the shingle beach a mile from his house. He loved the way it stretched flatly out until it melted into the horizon. He loved the way that he could walk for hours and not seemingly have moved. He particularly enjoyed walks there at night, when the lights of the oil refinery on the other side of the estuary blazed like a city from a science fiction film.
He found a number of things on these walks. Toys, mermaid’s purses, driftwood riddled with boreholes, ancient bottles, lumps of anthracite polished by the action of the waves and sand. He would take these items home and place them in a glass fronted cabinet in his bedroom. Once, he found a locket, a cheap, mass-produced brass locket. He spent months wondering whose it was, the picture inside was of a young man in military uniform, and he imagined that it was a long-lost keepsake. The locket didn’t go in the cabinet, he kept it with him as he walked, working up a rich backstory for the young soldier and his lost love. His troop-ship had been torpedoed in the first months of 1945, tragically close to the end of the war and his fiancé, distraught, had come down to the shore to cast her locket in as an offering to the sea to give him up again. When he didn’t return to her, she forswore the love of any man until the day she died.

It was only when he heard story about these lockets appearing up and down the coast that he realised that his experience was far from
unique. The local paper’s “History Matters” section carried an article about a container ship, the Gross Indifference, running aground some winters before. Amongst the containers lost had been a consignment of costume jewellery, the young man in the photo was a stock picture. For weeks readers wrote in saying they’d found one. He didn’t.

For some reason he never fully understood he found this to be an immense relief. The thought of the woman’s grief for her lost love had been weighing heavily on him so much that it had become tangible. That autumn he finally took his place at University. The first night, in the student bar, he acquired the nickname Hulk.

Roast, all the trimmings

I wake to a phone call. I don't know who from. It's the landline. Only my Mum ever rings on the landline. It must be my Mum. She's also the only person who rings this early. So far, so logical, I open an eye, it's at floor-level.

The first thing I need to do is find the phone. It doesn't stop.

I say "the first thing I need to do is find the phone" as though it'll be a difficult task, as though there are drifts of crap silting up my house and the landline, long forgotten, is lurking at the bottom of one of the more fetid piles.

There aren't any fetid piles, my house is pretty tidy. I, for all my faults, am pretty tidy. And I actually use the landline quite a lot. People don't, and I don't know why. It's really quite cheap to do so and you don't have to keep stopping and starting and saying "sorry, are you there?". But I can't quite remember where I left it. It's still ringing, an insistent four bars of "Ode to Joy" that were the default when I bought it and I have never quite got round to changing.

The back room. Occasionally referred to somewhat grandly as the study. That's where I was last time I used it. I phoned for a pizza and stood looking out of the window as I did so, contemplating the advanced stage of rewilding of the garden. We're at scrubland, now, primary succession of pioneer tree species any day now, I reckon. I climb the stairs, having awoken on the living room floor, using slightly more balustrade than should be necessary in a man of my vintage, which, without wishing to go into too much detail, is older than Millenial, younger than Boomer. The ones that get caught in the crossfire of the culture wars.

(I'm not saying Generation X, only wankers say Generation X)

It's still ringing. It must be Mum, she's the only one that's this persistent. I find it perched jauntily on the back bedroom windowsill and answer, as much to stop the ringing as anything else.

"Hi Mum"

"Urgh, Freudian much?" The voice is female, but it's a few decades south of mother. It takes me a beat to work out who it is.

"Rachel, a pleasant surprise, well, you do always say I can't look after myself" Nicely done, situation rescued. Not bad for a bloke with a pounding head who only woke up thirty seconds ago.

She's phoning to see if I want to go out to lunch, which, whilst a pleasant suggestion, is quite a surprising one. I don't think I've ever regarded Rachel and I as being quite on a lunch footing before. I'm reasonably confident that she's never regarded us as being on a lunch footing before. The subject of lunch has rarely come up. Breakfast, occasionally, but not lunch.

Whilst I couldn't attest to it one hundred percent, I'm sure that most of us have, at some point, had a friend along these lines. The hermano, the compadre, the partner in mischief but not much else, whose lives drift in and out of each others orbits. She is normally spoken for, generally by wealthy young men called things like Toby or Marcus who wear their sunglasses on top of their heads. I, as I'm sure you've gathered by now, am rarely spoken for.

What does she mean by lunch? Is lunch a thing? I ponder the meaning of lunch as I shower and make myself, if not presentable, then at least slightly less hideous. A decent suit goes a long way at a time like this. The next surprise, when she turns up, is that she's driving.

“Not a liquid lunch, then?” I say and she gives me this disappointed look as if she’d expected better. I rather feel that I've fallen at the first hurdle.

"You're overdressed" she says.

"Not I" I reply, "everybody else is under-dressed." This is untrue, in her case at least. She is simply, but expensively, dressed and looks, what's the word I'm looking for? Glossy.

We head out of town a little way, to low slung, sprawling sort of country pub which looks vaguely familiar, though I have as much to do with the countryside as I do with learning Basque, so I’m confident I’ve not been here before. She says something about them doing a good roast, and I surprise myself by following this suggestion and ordering one from our friendly waitress who, it transpires, is called Belinda. Bit naff, the Sunday roast, I’ve always thought. A bit too redolent of well-fed chaps who refer to “the good lady wife” and call the barman “stout yeoman of the bar”, it’s always had a whiff of the golf club to it, for me, of the sort of people who care about lawns; or maybe that’s because on a Sunday I normally can’t bear to look at any food that isn’t a bacon sandwich until past seven pm, possibly some crisps if I’m particularly delicate.

So we sit there, she and I, eating our roasts , and I find myself starting to enjoy the experience. I'm not a connoisseur of the roast dinner by any means, but I'd hazard a guess that this is an exemplar of the form, moist pork, a cracking bit of crackling, crisp, golden potatoes, veg which hasn't been boiled into submission and, best of all, the sort of gravy which speaks of a monomaniac in charge of the stock-pot, not the floury effluvial cack I'd been fearing.

It is.…normal, it's normal. This, I realise, is what people do. They come out to acceptable country pubs and eat acceptable foods in rooms painted an acceptable shade of light green. I looked across at Rachel and she is smiling at me in an amused manner, inclining her glass of whatever vile mixed fruit thing it was towards me, a spear of asparagus impaled on the fork in her other hand. I clink my glass with hers, it's an acceptable Kiwi Pinot, since you ask. Reasonably priced, nothing life-changing.

“Nice this, isn’t it?” She says, and it is. It's nice.

I am instantly seized with horror. This is too suburban for words. This, my friends, will not end well. I see myself strolling around, surveying my lawn, nodding approvingly. I see myself taking regular exercise. I see myself shopping for furniture. One doesn't shop for furniture. Furniture just sort of happens. But she's still smiling and in that smile I see my doom, my utter annihilation, the ablation of my soul, the strata of the self ripped away by the unstoppable tide of the future. She's still smiling and in that smile I think I can perceive absolute damnation. She knows. She's reading my thoughts. The fix is in.

The fix is in. She is reading my thoughts, because her smile is widening, it's the smile of one who knows that they are the only one in on the joke. It's angelic and it's diabolical. She stands, and makes for the Ladies, pausing only to lean down and murmur into my ear.

"It's just lunch, Matt, get over yourself."