Read Online Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page B

quickly, and with too little effect, to justify the increasingly frail Miss Thinne carrying it home.
    Finally, on the 25th, Miss Thinne collapsed at the shop, fracturing two of her ribs on the grocer’s burly arms as he leapt forward to catch her. Desperately though she tried to leave for home, she lost consciousness in the attempt and was, instead, promptly removed to a hospital.
    Mere hours later, Miss Fatt’s helpless bellowing for food provoked neighbours to call the police, so that she, too, ended up being taken to a hospital, albeit a different one.
    In Miss Thinne’s hospital, staff of various ranks said:
    ‘Don’t you worry, dear: you’ll be right as rain in no time.’ Or:
    ‘Well then, Eleanor, you haven’t been taking very good care of yourself, have you?’
    After a day or two, no longer to her but in her earshot, they said other things too, like:
    ‘Progressive lipodystrophy.’
    ‘Hypophyseal cachexia.’
    ‘I think the little bitch must be taking something to flushthe IV fluids through her system without absorbing them. Search her bedside locker.’
    In Miss Fatt’s hospital, Miss Fatt was not addressed directly even in the beginning, because her problem was diagnosed as being mental in origin rather than physical. The fact that no one tried to communicate with her didn’t matter much anyway, since she might not have been able to listen: her ears were swelling up into little puddings. She certainly couldn’t hear the farrago of diagnoses and recommendations her doctors were thinking up for her in faraway parts of the building.
    ‘Prader-Willi Syndrome.’
    ‘Glandular dystrophy.’
    ‘Staple her stomach.’
    ‘Shorten her intestine.’
    ‘Step up the reducing diet.’
    ‘Suprarenal tumour.’
    ‘I’d go for Cushing’s Disease myself.’
    Miss Fatt, for her part, had only one thing to say, only one suggestion to make.
    ‘Feed me!’ she cried. ‘I’m hungry!’ Her voice was squashed into a hoarse bleat by the fat in her throat pressing in on her vocal cords.
    ‘You’ve had your thousand calories,’ snapped a nurse. ‘At breakfast.’
    ‘Then kill me!’ sobbed Miss Fatt. ‘I want to die!’
    ‘Don’t be stupid, Mrs Fatt’ was the nurse’s retort. Like all the nurses, she found the fat woman in Room 13 monstrous and loathsome, but felt professionally obliged to pretend that she found her merely annoying and difficult, in case the patient might be shamed into making a recovery.

Ninth Month
    On December the 25th, Miss Fatt lay on a cot, or rather two cots pushed together, in the psycho-geriatric wing of a large hospital far from the residential part of town. She was naked, not because of her almost constant feeling of suffocation, but because no institution nightgowns were big enough to fit her and, as no one was paying for her stay, it wasn’t worth getting one specially made.
    Miss Fatt was under treatment for suicidal tendencies arising from her delusion that she would continue to gain weight no matter how little she was given to eat or how many experimental drugs she was injected with. The room in which she was locked was free of edible substances and sharp implements; free of everything, in fact, except for the cots and a naked lightbulb overhead.
    Trapped inside a quivering mass of fat, the tortured spirit of Miss Fatt was capable of nothing but stubborn outrage.
    ‘I – need – food !’ was all she said to her keepers, her voice almost strangled to a squeak.
    ‘You’re just an animal,’ a nurse accused her one day, as she warily cleaned up the enormous droppings smeared all over Miss Fatt’s cot-sides. Her slim, well-proportioned body was trembling with disgust and awe.
    Others said: ‘Slut.’
    Others said: ‘Cow.’
    Miss Fatt just lay there, waiting for her meals. Her only distractions from the unbearable hours of longing were her agonies of breathlessness, headache, angina, sinusitis and thrombosis. The doctors were making bets among themselves as to what