A Traitor to Memory by Elizabeth George
MAIDA VALE,
LONDON
FAT GIRLS CAN do. Fat girls can do. Fat girls can do and do and do.
As she trod the pavement towards her car, Katie Waddington used her regular mantra in rhythm with her lumbering pace. She said the words mentally instead of aloud, not so much because she was alone and afraid of seeming batty but rather because to say them aloud would put further demands on her labouring lungs. And they had trouble enough to keep going. As did her heart which, according to her always sententious GP, was not intended to pump blood through arteries that were being fast encroached upon by fat.
When he looked at her, he saw rolls of flesh, he saw mammae hanging like two heavy flour sacks from her shoulders, he saw a stomach that drooped to cover her pubis and skin that was cratered with cellulite. She was carrying so much weight on her frame that she could live for a year on her own tissues without eating, and if the doctor was to be believed, the fat was moving in on her vital organs. If she didn't do something to curb herself at table, he declared each time she saw him, she was going to be a goner.
“Heart failure or stroke, Kathleen,” he told her with a shake of his head. “Choose your poison. Your condition calls for immediate action, and that action is not intended to include ingesting anything that can turn into adipose tissue. Do you understand?”
How could she not? It was her body they were talking about and one couldn't be the size of a hippo in a business suit without noticing that fact when the opportunity arose to have a glimpse at one's reflection.
But the truth of the matter was that her GP was the only person in Katie's life who had difficulty accepting her as the terminally fat girl she'd been from childhood. And since the people who counted took her as she was, she had no motivation to shed the thirteen stone that her doctor was recommending.
If Katie had ever harboured a doubt about being embraced by a world of people who were increasingly buffed, toned, and sculpted, she'd had her worth reaffirmed this night as it was every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when her Eros in Action groups met from seven till ten o'clock. There, the sexually dysfunctional populace of Greater London came together for solace and solution. Directed by Katie Waddington—who'd made the study of human sexuality her lifelong passion—libidos were examined; erotomania and -phobia were dissected; frigidity, nymphomania, satyrism, transvestitism, and fetishisms were admitted to; erotic fantasies were encouraged; and erotic imagination was stimulated.
“You saved our marriage,” her clients gushed. Or their lives, or their sanity, or frequently their careers.
Sex is commerce was Katie's motto, and she had nearly twenty years of approximately six thousand grateful clients and a waiting list of two hundred more to prove this true.
So she walked to her car in a state that was somewhere between self-satisfaction and absolute rapture. She might be anorgasmic herself, but who was to know as long as she had success in consistently promoting happy orgasm in others? And that's what the public wanted, after all: guilt-free sexual release upon demand.
Who guided them to it? A fat girl did.
Who absolved them of the shame of their desires? A fat girl did.
Who taught them everything from stimulating erogenous zones to simulating passion till passion returned? A terminally hugely preposterously fat girl from Canterbury did and did and did.
That was more important than counting calories. If Katie Waddington was meant to die fat, then that was the way she'd die.
It was a cool night, just the way she liked it. Autumn had finally come to the city after a beastly summer, and as she trundled along in the darkness Katie relived, as she always did, the high points of her evening's group session.
A Traitor to Memory
Elizabeth George's books
- Bared to You
- Beauty from Pain
- Beneath This Man
- Fifty Shades Darker
- Fifty Shades Freed (Christian & Ana)
- Fifty Shades of Grey
- Grounded (Up In The Air #3)
- In Flight (Up In The Air #1)
- Mile High (Up In The Air #2)
- KILLING SARAI (A NOVEL)
- Not Today, But Someday
- Point of Retreat (Slammed #2)
- Slammed (Slammed #1)
- Tatiana and Alexander_A Novel
- THE BRONZE HORSEMAN
- The Summer Garden
- This Girl (Slammed #3)
- Bait: The Wake Series, Book One
- Beautiful Broken Promises
- Into the Aether_Part One
- Loving Mr. Daniels
- Tamed
- Holy Frigging Matrimony.....
- MacKenzie Fire
- Willing Captive
- Vain
- Reparation (The Kane Trilogy Book 3)
- Flawless Surrender
- The Rosie Project
- The Shoemaker's Wife
- CHRISTMAS AT THOMPSON HALL
- A Christmas Carol
- A High-End Finish
- Always(Time for Love Book 4)
- Rebel Yells (Apishipa Creek Chronicles)
- TMiracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America
- Rising Fears
- Aftermath of Dreaming
- The Death of Chaos
- The Paper Magician
- Bad Apple - the Baddest Chick
- The Meridians
- Lord John and the Hand of Devils
- Recluce 07 - Chaos Balance
- Fall of Angels
- Ten Thousand Charms
- Nanny
- Scared of Beautiful
- A Jane Austen Education
- A Cliché Christmas
- Year Zero
- Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
- Colors of Chaos
- Rising
- Unplugged: A Blue Phoenix Book
- The Wizardry Consulted
- The Boys in the Boat
- Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General
- It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways
- yes please
- The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
- An Absent Mind
- The Pecan Man
- My Sister's Grave
- A Week in Winter
- The Orphan Master's Son
- The Light Between Oceans
- All the Light We Cannot See- A Novel
- Departure
- Daisies in the Canyon
- STEPBROTHER BILLIONAIRE
- The Bone Clocks: A Novel
- Naked In Death
- Words of Radiance
- A Discovery of Witches
- Shadow of Night
- Written in My Own Heart's Blood
- The Magician’s Land
- Fool's errand
- The High Druid's Blade
- Stone Mattress
- The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
- Die Again
- A String of Beads
- No Fortunate Son A Pike Logan Thriller
- All the Bright Places
- Saint Odd An Odd Thomas Novel
- The Other Language
- The Secret Servant
- The Escape (John Puller Series)
- The Atopia Chronicles (Atopia series)
- The Warded Man
- Return of the Crimson Guard
- The Source (Witching Savannah, Book 2)
- Dragonfly in Amber
- Assail
- Return of the Crimson Guard
- Authority: A Novel
- The Last Town (The Wayward Pines Trilogy 3)
- The Man In The High Castle