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Clacton Collaboration (2)
posted Saturday, 19 July 2008
FIT, FAT & FORTY
by the Clacton Writers' Group (July 2008)
Judith was triumphant. She could now open a can of beans without assistance. A small victory but it meant a lot to her. She so wanted to be independent like before the accident. She listened to other women when queuing in a clothes shop as they droned on about their worries and problems. Silly, superficial things like they can’t find a nice top that matches their shoes or how they wish they were more fit and not so fat at forty. Why couldn’t they get things into perspective like her? However, it shouldn’t mean that people must have accidents or horrible diseases like a dose of medicine to make them wake up and smell the coffee.
She used to be like those other women and although she saw life for what it was and appreciated it every day, she wished it hadn’t taken this tragic event for her to think like that. She had stopped worrying about her weight and was now more concerned about picking up a saucepan or opening a door. Her husband had stood by her and did a lot for her but it had meant he had taken a lot of time off work. That’s why relief had flooded her at the opening of the beans. It signified a step along the road towards a better home life. Pete could go back to work and stop giving her that guilty look of his.
He did feel responsible and it ate away at him every day. “It was an accident, not your fault,” Judith would constantly tell him but it didn’t matter. His big eyes drooped so much they looked as if they were going to plop out onto the floor. It was a shame because she had dealt with it so much better than him. It had made her grasp life more because she could have so easily lost it that day.
Mind you, she knew why he felt as he did. Sometimes imagining what someone else was going through was worse than experiencing it yourself – especially if you felt responsible for any pain they might be experiencing.
But hey! It had been Pete’s fault. If he hadn’t left the blasted tool box on the stairs she wouldn’t have tripped over it and tumbled to the bottom. Okay, so it was only a few steps because he’d left the toolbox on the bend in the stairs, just before the long flight up to the first floor. And okay, he’d assumed she’d see the bright blue box on the orange carpet, but didn’t he realise that you couldn’t see what was on that step until you came round the bend? And if you came round the bend carrying a linen basket full of dirty clothes then you didn’t see anything anyway, and were trusting your memory as to where the stairs were.
Anyway, there was nothing to be gained from appointing blame. She’d fallen, the clothes had scattered everywhere and the bones in her wrist had shattered. Well, not shattered perhaps; they’d said at the hospital that it was a nice, clean break, but it damn well felt as though they’d shattered.
It was her left hand which bore the brunt of the fall, which would have been good for most people, but for her it was disastrous; she did everything with her left hand.
And it didn’t bear thinking about that if they hadn’t moved the bookcase the day before the accident then her head would have smashed into the corner of it. She knew that was so, because when she opened her eyes following the fall she found she was laying – half on squashed carpet pile, where feet had trod, dogs had lain, carrier bags full of shopping had been placed – and half on the soft, long pile that had been between the bookcase feet and had never been squashed.
But back to the beans. No good thinking ‘what ifs’. She’d opened the beans now and, more to the point, she hadn’t spilt any of their stain-making juice. Even if she had spilt it, that wouldn’t have mattered, because she’d already thought she may spill the contents, especially with her weak left wrist, so she’d opened them over the sink.
As she turned away from the sink her old slippers caught on the curled-up edge of the carpet she always kept in front of the sink.
As Judy fell it seemed, to her, to take forever. She had time to realise that if she used her hands to cushion her fall then the damage to her wrist might be very complicated indeed so she turned, legs twisted, to take the brunt of her fall on her well padded bottom, careful to keep her hands away from the floor and the can of beans towards the ceiling.
Her head thumped the floor with just enough force to rebound upwards in time to meet the can of beans, now upside down, in its downward flight. Beans, in tomato sauce of course, cascaded over her head, into her eyes, mouth, cleavage, hair – everywhere. The jagged, serrated lid was still attached because, with here earlier injury, she had not been able to quite complete the 360 degrees needed to separate it, and this sharp edge just caught her cheek a glancing blow.
Without the weight of beans behind it, the tin only just sliced her cheek – enough to cut, enough to bleed, enough to upset her, but not enough to cause any real damage. Make-up would easily disguise it.
She sat up on the kitchen floor, looked around her at the mess and promptly burst into tears. They ran down her face, leaving trails of clean skin in a tomato-juice visage. Like a circus clown or tragi-comic actor.
The reality hit her; no real damage, nothing out of the usual, just yet another catastrophe in the life of Calamity Judy. How could she have let Pete carry on thinking that it had been his fault? Out of sheer frustration she screamed.
Pete was there, at her side, theatrically pulling her close to him. Wiping tears, blood, juice and beans off her. His actions were mechanical, medical as if unaware of the more sensitive areas he touched. His eyes met hers as he picked a rogue bean from between the strands of her hair. His hold slackened as he pushed her away and squashed the bean between his thumb and middle finger. He fought to control himself. The battle was never going to be easy. The victory lost before he’d even started. He rocked slightly, to and fro. He removed another bean from the floor as he listened to her crying.
His mouth parted. He bit his lower lip. He tried to cast sympathetic eyes to her. She didn’t look up. He looked away. He concentrated on picking up individual beans and holding them safe in his massive hands.
“I was trying…,” Judy said between sobs. “Well I managed it, after a fashion.” She stammered as if consciously trying to remember each word before actually saying it. “I’d left the slippers, and I guess that’s why they’re called slippers!” Her feeble forced joke matched her tone. She wasn’t sure if Pete was listening and she wasn’t going to look up to see for herself. She felt foolish and wasn’t going to risk meeting his censorial eyes. Not again. Not this time. Not when it was obviously her fault.
The laughter was so loud and so strident that she was momentarily stunned. She raised her head to notice his face. Contorted and laughing as hard as he could. She then realised that his hands were being held above her head. She looked up at the very instant that he released the baked beans – showering her once again and splattering himself in the process. She was so shocked for a moment words failed her. Then she realised how funny she must look covered in beans, and because she had come through the almost scripted episode relatively unscathed, she joined Pete in the raucous laughter.
“No harm done,” he said eventually. “Don’t worry I’ll clear this up. You go and see to yourself.”
Pete turned to let Judy pass. Unfortunately being unfit, fat and forty, he moved rather clumsily and slipped in the bean juice. He toppled over sideways like the statue of a deposed leader being brought down. He hit his head against the floor but there was no rebound this time. He lay unmoving. Judy couldn’t believe what had happened. She knelt down beside him, repeatedly calling his name and pulling at him to wake him up. His pulse seemed steady but there was no other response. She finally panicked and called the emergency services.
In a matter of minutes two paramedics arrived. A man and a woman. They were astonished at the scene which greeted them. The woman they saw was adorned with a mixture of blood, tomato juice and beans streaked down her face and body. She was crying hysterically. It was almost impossible to understand a word she said. In the kitchen a large fat man lay prone in a similar mixture. It was a scene of carnage. They separately wondered what kind of fight had been going on between these two.
Even as the two paramedics assessed the scene, Judith slipped over again on the tomato juice.
It was at this moment that Pete started to groan, and he slowly moved his head. “Does it all fit?” he mumbled, with studied emphasis.
“Fit? Fit what, sir?” asked the paramedic as he did the first inspection of the incident and how the human beings involved were faring within its assumed context of cause and effect. He more or less ignored what Pete said, believing him to be dazed or delirious or drugged.
“Do the events fit...?” Pete continued. “The beans, the blood, the motives, the likely results?”
“We can sort all that out later, but now we need to get you both to hospital. What’s your name? And the lady’s?”
“Pete and Judith.”
“Well, Pete and Judith, you need to listen very carefully...”
The male paramedic suddenly stopped. The job was getting too much for him. At forty, he was still young enough, but he was becoming increasingly fat, and he often now found it difficult to bend so as to tend to accident cases and then negotiate their recovery to the ambulance. The female paramedic simply knew her partner was too fat for the job. She frowned as she stared at him trying to attend to Pete.
The whole thing seemed staged. Concocted. A test case.
Judith and Pete had been chosen by a concertina of linked events, even from the very moment of their marriage years ago – all leading to this culmination – this destiny, this tableau of four people frozen at a cross-roads of an accident-prone life.
Pete eventually helped himself and Judith to their feet without involvement from the paramedics.
“We shall be OK,” said Pete. “Sorry to have called you. We shall heal. We shall get better.” He hesitated then said emphatically, dramatically: “We only have old age to fear.”
And with tears in their eyes, Pete and Calamity Judy hugged each other, golden flowing beans between their chests, her left hand managing to scrabble round his neck to haul his face nearer for a messy kiss.
The two paramedics left in silence. Silent except for the suspicion of their sobbing.
