of the snack bar and walked in. Standing behind the glass case were a small man and a woman. They were Chinese. Tony ordered something unintelligible that the woman immediately understood. He came here every day. She scooped some French fries into the deep fat fryer and slid in a frikandel. Tony sat down on a bar stool with his helmet on his lap. He lit a cigarette and threw some money into the slot machine. Smoking in the snack bar was prohibited.
‘I have to buy something,’ said Gieles, who was standing behind him. ‘Be back in a minute.’
Outside he took a deep breath of fresh air. He walked down the shopping street and passed a small group of girls he knew from the higher grades at school. Reflexively he smoothed down his high voltage hair.
Once inside the department store he went to the sunglasses department. Gravitation had asked for photos. First she talked about Scandinavian music and metal bands, then she said she was a fan of Jake Gyllenhaal ‘drip drip drip.’ He didn’t understand what she meant by Jake Gyllenhaal and ‘drip drip drip,’ and wrote back that he thought he was awesome, too. Then he made the mistake of declaring that, like her, he was a fan of the metal bands Lostprophets, Cradle of Filth and The Vandals.
‘Real original,’ she wrote back, promptly asking for photos.
Naturally she’d see that he was younger. That’s why he needed the sunglasses. He stared into the display mirror and tried to look impressive by squinting and rubbing his hand over his chin. Satisfied, he noticed that his hair was lying down flat. It probably came from the greasy helmet. He exchanged a nonchalant glance with himself.
Then he pulled up the left corner of his mouth. He had seen Elvis do that on one of Tony’s mother’s DVDs. Sometimes she watched Elvis for days on end, especially his performance in the black leather suit. Gieles had to admit that it did look cool when he did that thing with his mouth.
He saw that one of the sales clerks was watching him. She was smiling at him in a motherly sort of way, leaning against a pillar. Gieles felt like an idiot. Embarrassed, he grabbed a pair of sunglasses from the display. They were dark grey with mirror lenses. He didn’t dare put them on, afraid the woman was still laughing at him. At the checkout he discovered that the sunglasses far exceeded his budget. So he paid with his bank card and left the department store.
Halfway down the street he saw Tony coming with a boy he didn’t like. The boy’s father ran a waste processing plant, which you could tell somehow just by looking at him.
With his head lowered he turned into a side street and went into a CD shop. He wandered through the shop for a few minutes and looked outside. On the other side of the glass was a red mobility scooter. His jaw dropped. The body in the scooter was far and away the fattest body he had ever seen in his life. The double chin looked like a swimming tube with a head bobbing around inside it. The rest looked like an explosion that was just barely being contained by a grey sweatsuit. Gieles was convinced that the shop window was creating a funhouse mirror effect. So much fat—it just wasn’t possible. He went to the doorway to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.
Gieles stared at the enormous mass, mesmerised. It took a few minutes for him to realise that all that flesh was home to a single human being. The flesh belonged to a man, and the man was clearly in trouble. The back tyre of his scooter was flat. The man tried to pull himself up, but at the halfway point he gave up and dropped back onto the seat. Minutes passed. Tony and his little waste-processing friend were nowhere to be seen. Gieles just stood there and the man just sat there, immobile and abandoned. He didn’t ask anyone for help. Passers-by looked at him as if he were stuck fast in his own shit.
Gieles made up his mind to slip out of the shop and take the bus home. He hurried outside.
Don’t look!
But he couldn’t help himself, and at that very moment their eyes met. The man gazed at him with fierce intensity, as if he were the last remaining dog in the animal shelter and Gieles was his final hope. It would be rotten to pretend he hadn’t seen him.
Reluctantly he walked up to the man. ‘Sir … you have … a flat tyre.’
‘I know,’ came a voice from under the layers of fat. ‘The problem is that I can’t go any further. It would ruin the rims.’
He pronounced the last words with such defeat that Gieles felt even more sorry for him.
‘Can you walk?’ asked Gieles.
‘If I hold onto something I ought to be able to manage it.’ He had a thin man’s voice, smooth and fluid. ‘I live right back there.’
‘I can drive the scooter,’ Gieles heard himself say, much to his alarm. ‘My uncle has one, and I drive it every now and then.’
‘I gladly accept your offer,’ the man said with relief, and he held out his hand.
Gieles looked at the lump of blubber with dismay. Then he shook it, trying to hide his disgust, and his entire hand disappeared inside it, as if he were putting on a baseball glove.
‘Super Waling. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Gieles,’ he said. ‘Gieles Bos.’
With immense effort, Super Waling hoisted his mountainous body out of the mobility scooter. Gieles didn’t want to look, so he turned his face upward, to the sky. A plane flew overhead, its white belly appearing very vulnerable.
‘Can you provide me with a little counterweight?’ the man gasped. ‘Yes, yes, there … in the back … yes … yes, right … very good …’
Gieles sat down in the scooter. The seat was still warm. He choked down his saliva with difficulty. The man held onto the back of the seat with his right hand while Gieles drove at a snail’s pace. After a hundred metres the man came to a stop, swaying slightly. ‘I appreciate this enormously,’ he said with a long-winded wheeze. ‘Really … enormously …’
Running away was out of the question. The colossus heaved himself forward in slow-motion.
They passed shops and a restaurant. UNLIMITED SPARE RIBS it said on the sign. Gieles wondered whether that applied to everyone.
After an eternity they stopped at the orange front door of a small house in a new subdivision. The man unlocked the door with trembling hands.
‘Come in,’ he gasped, out of breath.
‘I really have to go,’ said Gieles to the gigantic expanse of back as the man slowly shuffled his way into the living room. He didn’t answer.
He’s gonna drop dead. I’ll wait until he’s sitting down and then make a run for it.
The man sank into a big armchair. Gieles stood at the doorway.
‘Have a seat.’ His face was covered with strange purple splotches.
‘On second thought, pour yourself something to drink … you’ve earned it … there in the kitchen … at the end of the hallway.’
I’ll walk to the front door and run away.
Gieles didn’t run away. He walked obediently to the kitchen, which looked as if it had never been used. The refrigerator was surprisingly small. Its contents surprised him, too. He had expected buckets of mayonnaise, chunks of cheese, mountains of sausages, kilos of cooking fat.
