So she comes in, Tuesday night, the usual Weight Mates session, just a bag of wretched bones. She’s early, pacing the foyer, wrapped in too many layers of hand-me-down clothes, goose-bumps scarping the skinny pokers of her wrists.
You OK love? I ask. Usual tone. Unperturbed. Seen it all before.
Not really, she says, still pacing.
I’m thinking drugs. I’m thinking parental abuse. I’m thinking wrong place, wrong time.
What can we do for you?
Make me thin.
Oh love, I think but don’t say. You are so beyond thin. Thin would be a good day. A Christmas dinner day. A 20,000 steps day. You are what thin would look like if it truly hated itself.
You know where you are, right?
Yes.
You can pay the fee? Five pounds per session or fifty for the full term.
Yes.
Well, you’d better come up, then.
**********
I take her up to the attic room. It’s all wood and God and posters here, but they don’t charge much and, together, all bingo wings and broken promises, we are a sorry bunch.
Step on the scales.
They are industrial quality, drug-dealer quality. They register every pound. Every tear. Every emission. They have to. Some of my girls drop a marble’s weight in increments, week on week. Still, they come back. Watch the numbers and they become addictive, like anything you can measure in pain.
The digital readout zeroes with the pressure of her body, and I wonder if, maybe, it’s just going to stop there. That this tiny little Sinead-O-Connor bitch won’t register anything at all. But she does. Six stone, eleven pounds. Too much, it turns out, always too much.
OK, and what weight would you like to be? I ask, business-like.
She bursts into tears. I fold her in my arms.
I don’t know, she says. But I know I’m ugly. From the ground up, ugly. Rotten inside. Disgusting.
She’s really pushing it. Really pushing me. Kate Moss would love to look this bad. Naomi would throw her phone for this kind of reward. Kim and Heidi would shed a BFF to get this kind of BMI.
I think I can help you, I say.
*****
Later, the girls waddle in, all guilt and gossip and whispered assurances that next week, the week after, they will do better, be better. After the weighing, the car-crash confessionals, I announce her.
Come out, come out wherever you are.
At first, there is a gasp.
I say, Sinead – this is not her real name – why don’t you tell the girls what it is you hope to achieve?
She shuffles out, all wool and sniffles. A walking ghost. I can see what they’re thinking. I know them. I was them, a while ago. She disgusts them. Her tiny bones. Her little face. Her messed-up life. Her six-point-eleven fucking stones. The succinctness with which she carries her sorrow.
This is what you’re aiming for, I say. Class dismissed.
*****
I don’t know how much longer it took for her to die, but I know this. She came every week, without fail, stood on the scales, and did what I told her. The girls, my girls, were outraged, outclassed and finally impressed.
Soon, she dropped from six stone eleven, to ten, to eight, to ashes. Soon, they cheered for her like one of their own.
It’s been a few weeks now since she left us. Tiny, under-attended funeral. No wake. No notice in the paper. Still, Jody lost a stone. Maria clean passed out. All of us were inspired by her sacrifice, and I wondered: how do you top that?
So now, I drive the streets at night, looking for hookers, for addicts, the waifs and strays. When I find one, I bring her back to class, and something magical happens. An alchemy. In the face of such sacrifice, everyone tries a little harder. And when they fail, as of course they do, whose fault is it really?