Waiting for Kate Bush Read Online Free Page A

harrumphed. Humider and humider. Now it was Graham’s expression that was very closely akin to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s on my initial mention of the fire brigade and their crane. “Well, in that case,” he said, “please do have a seat.”
    If looks could kill, I’d have been dead before I took three steps. I felt as though back in junior high school physical education. From my first exposure to them, I adored sports, even though I was rotten at all of them. But I detested gymnastics in general and the pole climb in particular. We boys were forever being timed climbing three metal poles in a big sandpit, presumably to gauge our fitness. I was very fit, from playing baseball and football and basketball and tennis and anything else I could persuade anyone to play with me, but had no aptitude whatever for the pole. Other boys shot up it, their new adolescent biceps bulging, their feet hardly touching the bloody thing. I could climb a rope because I could hold it between my feet. But the pole just laughed at me, along with all of the other boys – save the gormless, misshapen few who shared my ineptitude.
    In those days, I rode home on a school bus that let me out right in front of a liquor store whose stock of paperback novels depicting hard, bouffant-haired early-Sixties sexpots in sheath dresses slit up the sides drove me half mad with lust. “She was poured into her dress by women,” proclaimed the one I seem never to have forgotten, presumably about a model with Loose Morals, “… and pulled out of them by men!” How I ached for those women!
    Had one of them been at the top of the pole topless, I still wouldn’t have been able to climb the bastard.
    And the looks on the faces of The Boys Who Could as, after staring balefully at the pole until the sun-tanned sadist who was our instructor finally growled, “Either climb the son-of-a-bitch or go sit the fuck down,” I slinked back among my peers.
    It was those walks from the infernal metal pole back to my place that I remembered too well as I waddled ponderously from Graham.
    I could hear the laboured breathing of the most attractive of my fellow overeaters before I was within 10 feet of her. She was around 25, with gorgeous white skin, huge blue eyes and extraordinary thick cornsilk hair. If this girl had been told, “You’d be so gorgeous if only you’d lose … (your choice of weights),” once, she’d probably been told 10,000 times. If anything, she was even huger than the pink whale. And she was unmistakably suffering, consumed by self-loathing, terrified of the others, terrified of me, terrified by the thought of living another hour in her remarkable body. She visibly trembled at my approach. Tears raced down her globular cheeks. She whimpered between gasps.
    All she had in common with the behemoth beside her was immensity. The behemoth’s skin and hair were those of one who eats nothing not deep-fried. She seemed to be sweating lard. She was around 40, with little piggy eyes, loose hanging blue flab, and teeth the colour of weak tea. She was as bold as Miss Cornsilk was timid. “Just what do you fucking imagine you’re bloody doing here?” she demanded when I managed to smile at her. The might-have-been writer in me thought she’d have been better off changing the order of
bloody
and
fucking
, saving the best for last.
    “Crinolyn,” said the gigantic Afro-Caribbean woman beside her, “don’t. Please.”
    But Crinolyn wasn’t having any of it. Her little piggy eyes seared my own corneas. “Fucking chubby chaser? Is that your game, you?”
    A new arrival arrived, a huge young man as pretty in his own way as Miss Cornsilk, and as bloated. I realised I’d seen him on television. He’d had a very brief career as a singer, followed by an only slightly longer one as one of the celebrities on a series called
Lose It Or Die
, about morbidly obese H-list celebrities trying to learn to enjoy exercise. Apparently the group’s male sex symbol, he inspired a