Irvine Welsh - The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins

That’s what the lardass wants to hear. They want to believe that it’s all easy from here on in. That it can literally be done in their sleep. Because heaven forbid that they interrupt sitting in front of the TV, rising only to refrigerator-raid and pack shit into their sneaky, blubbery mouths. They don’t wanna get up before ten, eleven. Perish the thought that any diet and exercise regime should impinge on those basic American freedoms. And I’m sorry, Michelle Parish, you hot-assed little visionary, but what they do not need is more procrastination by sitting on those blubbery butts writing Morning fucking Pages. — It’s not Mrs., it’s Mi. . Lena. . please, call me Lena.

— Right, I smile. You GET Lena, THEN I will call you Lena, bitch. — So let’s just get you on this treadmill, Ms. Sorenson. . sorry, Lena. . I smile, as she steps on and I set the speed to 5 mph, — . . a nice even pace. . there. . how’s that? It quickly racks up to the mark and soon Sorenson is pounding along, sweating like a skulking schoolyard pervert.

— I. . I. .

— Too much! Surely not?

I’m met by the face of the fat moaner: the apologist, the self-pitying, poor-me quitter. — It’s. . really. . fast. .

I hate those stupid expressions more than anything. The bloated dumbass oil tanker, where you search for light in those eyes; the frightened child looking for Momma’s sweet treats to make it all better; the belligerent asshole who wants to kill themself and really doesn’t know why they’re here. It doesn’t matter which of those archetypes show up, I just wanna punch out every time-wasting bum I see wearing one of those goddamn insults to humanity.

As her meaty thighs wobble in those yoga pants, Sorenson’s face blooms florid. — I like to give my clients a goal, Lena. One more specific than just weight loss. A half-marathon, 10k, 5k, it don’t really matter.

— I. . I couldn’t. . I just. . cooo. . Sorenson’s heavy legs clatter on the accelerating rubber belt.

— Don’t wanna hear that word, those words; couldn’t, can’t, shouldn’t! You have to stand up. You have to come forward!

Sorenson cringes under the violating impact of my words, but she doesn’t stop. Her terror-stricken pout tells me she’s not exactly full of grace, but she’s doing . I burn her this way for a solid forty-five minutes, bringing her to reasonable jogging speed, then back to walking, then jogging again. At the end of it she’s glowing like a red-hot ember. Sweaty and exhausted as she climbs off the treadmill, Sorenson finds herself unable, for once in her life, to open her fat mouth to take in anything but the sweet air she’s forcing into her puny lungs. — You did well today, I signal her to follow me into the office, and she wobbles behind me, still gasping. — But remember that exercise is only one component to this. I’m giving you a diet sheet, and I swipe one from a stack on my desk. Push it into her grasping paw. As Sorenson looks at it, I watch her face subside.

I grab a card from the rack. — Call me if you start to get cravings for shit over the weekend, and trust me, you will.

Sorenson’s face tells me she’s got them already. — You’re really. . professional and dedicated, she gulps, fear sparking in her eyes.

— I’m serious about you losing weight. . Lena, so you need to be too. It isn’t easy, especially at the start. So phone me if you feel yourself going off the rails. We are fighting an addiction to crappy eating habits as well as poor exercise ones, I explain, thinking of Michelle’s wise words. — We are looking at the whole picture. You didn’t put this weight on in one day, and it won’t come off in one day.

— I know. . it makes sense.

— Good. It’s important we’re on the same page here. So, tell me about you. What do you do for a living?

— I’m. . Sorenson hesitates, — . . sort of an artist.

Sort of an artist. Everybody in SoBe who isn’t sort of a model or sort of a photographer, is sort of an artist. Waitress, I get it. Or maybe a trust-fund parasite, playing at it. — Cool. . Where are you from?

— Minnesota. A town called Potters Prairie in Otter County.

Are you fucking kidding me? — Right. . I’ll bet it’s a pretty part of the world.

— Yes, Sorenson says, and starts talking about Potters Prairie, before going back to the fucking causeway incident, which seems to have scarred that fat bitch more than it has me. — I can’t believe how strong you were on the Julia Tuttle. I need some of that strength and determination.

— Yes, but you aren’t a vampire and I’m not a blood bank, I snap. I’ve long recognized I can ride out an occasional contemptuous outburst, as my clients, in common with most of the fat, possess a considerable ability to edit out the uncomfortable. — Inner strength and focus is in all of us. My job is to help bring it out and develop it. To enable you find that explosive part of yourself that you are, for some reason, keeping buried, I tell her, and glance at the clock on the wall, suddenly anxious to get away from this social leech. — Right, I should go.

Sorenson rocks on the balls of her feet, evidently wanting me to hang around. — Oh, yes. . right. You, um, didn’t tell me where you were from?

No dice, fat girl; some of us have lives. — Boston originally. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go, I tell her, throwing my stuff into my bag, — and you really should shower now before you start to cool down too much under the air conditioning, and I head toward the exit, only whiplashing back to chide the crestfallen chubster, — Remember, watch what you eat!

Outside, there’s a sweet, cooling ocean breeze, and I go at a brisk trot across Flamingo Park, wanting to put as much distance between myself and that social predator as possible. Then, at the top end of Lenox, I see a grubby fuck with a camera dangling from his neck, hanging around outside my apartment block. What the fuck is this prick doing here? The show is long over! There’s always some lone loser trying to work an angle, some fucking intrusive psycho. .

Slowing down, I walk up quietly behind him. I tap his shoulder. The greasy prick turns around. — Lucy, he shouts, reaching for his camera.

I tear it out of the cocksucker’s hand, the band slipping over his head, and hurl it into the road. On impact, a small black piece snaps off it. — FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!

— My fucking cam— He looks at me in horror, then runs to retrieve the battered device.

As he cradles it in the street, as if it were the child victim of a hit-and-run, I take the opportunity to get in through the front door, a barrage of insults shrieking behind me.

In the apartment, I head straight for the shower. I touched that paparazzi creep’s shoulder and could feel the grubbiness from his filthy cum-splattered and nicotine-caked paw on that fucking camera. I’m just drying off when I get a call. — Lucy, it’s Lena Sorenson.

Fuck. Like, already, dude? It was evidently a mistake to give this creepy little porker my number. — Yes? I sharply intone.

— I think you should switch on the TV. . Channel 6.

I comply with the Porky Princess of Potters Prairie (seriously, who the fuck comes from a place called that ?) and spark the TV into action. The depressed set finally kicks in. I have a better-quality small-screen portable in my bedroom, but the picture is way too tiny. An anchor, whose face is almost as stiff as her lacquered hair and shoulder pads, is recounting the story of Sean McCandless, the wimpy gunman I disarmed. Between the images on the screen and Sorenson’s breathless commentary in my ear, the disturbing picture coalesces. My blood increasingly chills as the nippy air blasts from the vents above onto my wet skin. It emerges that McCandless was abused by a pedophile ring when he was a kid in foster homes. Those guys he was pursuing were both sex offenders who lived in a homeless colony under the Tuttle Causeway. I shiver, then start to convulse, holding the towel tight to me. I saved one, possibly two monsters, and sent down this poor kid who was only out for revenge after some sick-fuck priest ripped his baby-boy ass apart.