The Suit

Sidney Lipman was enjoying a quiet lunch when the visitation occurred. He hadn’t been expecting a visitation so he was quietly partaking of a cup of coffee and a cream cheese bagel, sitting behind the counter of his bespoke tailoring establishment in the Charing Cross Road.

Up to this point it had been a pretty uneventful day. Sidney liked to think of his little shop as one of the last outposts of traditional tailoring in an off-the-peg age. Most of his regulars were people of his own generation. There were few men under the age of fifty who preferred to have their suits handmade by an expert, and those who did tended to frequent the younger, trendier establishments where designers with inflated reputations charged an arm and a leg for their work.

But Sidney was close to retirement age now and had put away enough money over the years to cover his needs. So why worry if things were winding down? Sometimes it was nice to just sit around the place and do nothing at all.

Sidney was just thinking this when the door of the shop crashed open as though hit by some incredible force. Sidney glanced up in surprise, transfixed, a half-eaten bagel held several inches away from his open mouth. He waited.

In came the fattest man Sidney had ever clapped eyes on – or rather, he attempted to enter the shop. For one awful moment he managed to wedge himself in the doorway. Then, with a prodigious effort that seemed to shake the very foundations, he burst through and Sidney was able to take better stock of him.

He was enormous, a veritable mountain of wobbling, quivering blubber. In the first place he had to be all of six and a half feet tall. His chest had the approximate dimensions of a beer barrel and his stomach resembled several sacks of potatoes wrapped in a tarpaulin. His legs were like tree trunks, his arms like telegraph poles in circumference. On top of such an abundance of flesh, his head looked somehow incongruous, a mere pimple.

Forgetting his manners, Sidney sat there staring at the new arrival. The man approached the counter, the ancient floorboards creaking a protest beneath his weight. He fixed Sidney with a belligerent look and boomed out a request in a voice that was every bit as big as he was. ‘I want you to make me a suit.’

Sidney winced. ‘Mister,’ he said, ‘you don’t need a tailor, you need Rent-A-Tent.’

The quip had somehow slipped out unbidden and the minute he’d said it, Sidney felt like pulling out his tongue with a pair of pliers. The fat man didn’t look particularly amused by the remark, either.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘not that old joke.’

Sidney grinned sheepishly. ‘You heard it already, I guess.’

‘Twice in the past half hour,’ said the fat man. ‘First at Manny Epstein’s, then at Jacob Minsky’s. Now I hear it from you. Mr Lipman, you’re my last hope.’

Sidney felt thoroughly ashamed of himself. He ran a critical eye over the fat man’s present suit, a brown herringbone number that was virtually straining at the seams to contain him. His prodigious gut hung down over the waist of his trousers and it was evident that he couldn’t have buttoned the jacket to save his life.

‘You could do with a new suit,’ admitted Sidney. ‘That one’s on its last legs.’

‘Bad workmanship,’ said the man. ‘Only made for me a month ago and the bloody thing’s shrunk!’

Sidney raised his eyebrows at that. ‘That’s a quality fabric,’ he protested. ‘I really don’t think–’

‘The situation’s becoming desperate, Mr Lipman. I’m afraid to go out in case the whole thing falls apart on me. A man could get arrested. What do you say? I can’t get ready-made clothes in my size. Will you make me a suit?’

Sidney frowned. ‘I never like to turn business away. But, you know, it’s going to take an awful lot of material to . . .’

‘That’s not a problem, I’ll pay the going rate.’

‘And, well, I can’t guarantee that you’ll make the best-dressed list when it’s finished.’

‘Look on it as a challenge,’ suggested the fat man.

‘A challenge, you say. Well, yes, I always did respond to a challenge. It’s in my nature.’ Sidney set down the remains of his bagel and reached for his tape measure. ‘First we’ll measure you up, then we’ll look at some samples. You got anything in mind?’

The man shook his head, a movement that made him shake from head to foot like an agitated jelly. It was frightening to behold.

‘Colour doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’m past caring about luxuries like that. All I want is good strong cloth that fits. And I need it quick. This thing is going to give up the ghost any day now.’

‘I get the picture. Here, help me with this, would you?’

Together they attempted to manipulate the measure around the man’s spectacular waist. It wasn’t long enough, the ends failed to meet by several inches.

‘Happens all the time,’ sighed the fat man.

‘Don’t worry,’ Sidney reassured him. ‘I believe I’ve got a special outsize measure somewhere in the back room. I always figured it would come in useful one day. It should even accommodate you, Mr . . .?’

‘Small. Eddie Small.’

Sidney could not resist a smile. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I wish I was, Mr Lipman, I really do.’ There was a sadness in Eddie’s voice that was miles away from the popular image of the ‘jolly fat man’. There seemed instead to be an air of tragedy about him. He seemed almost on the point of bursting into tears.

Sidney’s smile faded and he felt suddenly awkward. ‘I’ll er, go fetch the measure,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Small, I’ll make you the best suit you ever had. And that’s a promise.’

Sidney pulled out all the stops on his new commission and was ready for the first fitting one week later. In the small fitting room at the back of the shop he began to pin the pieces of fabric around Eddie’s massive frame. But it immediately became apparent that something was wrong.

‘I don’t understand it,’ muttered Sidney, scratching his head. ‘I double-checked these measurements, but now they’re all an inch too small. It’s as if you’ve grown since last week.’

A look came to Eddie Small’s face: a wild-eyed, desperate look. ‘That’s ridiculous! You must have made a mistake!’ he protested.

‘Mr Small, I have been in this business thirty years. I don’t make mistakes like that.’ Sidney fetched the outsize measure and checked over the dimensions. Just as he’d thought, every single measurement had increased by the best part of an inch.

‘Maybe you just eat too much,’ said Sidney awkwardly.

‘Nonsense! I keep to a strict diet. Fat free, sugar free – I exist on a baked potato and a mouthful of salad every day.’

‘Well, excuse me, but I find that rather hard to . . .’

‘Mr Lipman, you’ve got to do something! I daren’t go out in this old suit any more. It’ll split open! I’ll be arrested for indecent exposure. I . . . I . . .’ Eddie broke off suddenly and clutched at his stomach. His red face had turned ashen.

‘Hey,’ said Sidney. ‘Mr Small, you ok?’

Eddie nodded grimly, his teeth clenched. ‘Just a pain. I’ll be all right in a minute.’

‘You get these pains often?’

Eddie nodded. ‘More and more all the time,’ he gasped. ‘Can I sit down for a minute?’

‘Sure. Over here.’

Sidney helped Eddie to an old bentwood chair. It creaked alarmingly as Eddie lowered his massive bulk onto it, but thankfully it withstood the strain.

Eddie was sweating profusely. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his brow. ‘It’s no use,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been kidding myself. This is just a waste of time.’ He looked glumly up at Sidney. ‘You’re right, Mr Lipman. There’s nothing wrong with your measurements. It’s me. I’m growing. I get bigger every day.’

Sidney shook his head. ‘Ok, so, forewarned is forearmed. We can go for a much looser fit, allow room for a little growth.’

Eddie laughed bitterly. ‘A little growth?’ he muttered. ‘You don’t understand, Mr Lipman. It’s more than that. A year ago I weighed ten stone.’

Sidney raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve, er, certainly filled out a bit,’ he said lamely. ‘How could anybody put on so much, so fast? It seems . . . unnatural.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’

‘Is it some kind of illness? A glandular thing?’

Eddie shook his head. ‘No. What it is, Mr Lipman, is a punishment.’

Sidney considered this for a moment. His doubt must have been evident because Eddie grabbed hold of his arm, as though touching him would somehow help lend his story credence. ‘I know how it sounds. You probably think I’m mad. And the truth of it is, if I’m not already then I soon will be. But I implore you, just listen to what I have to say before you dismiss the idea.’

‘Look, I don’t know about this. I’m just a simple tailor . . .’

‘Please, Mr Lipman. I need to talk to somebody.’

Sidney shrugged. It was another quiet day and trade had been far from brisk. What harm was there in letting the man tell his story? Sidney pulled up another chair and sat down. ‘Ok, I’m listening.’

Eddie Small nodded and smiled gratefully. Then he began.

‘Up until a few months ago I was a trouble-shooter for one of the major sugar refiners, a job that took me all over the world. Needless to say, I don’t work for them any more. Even if I could fit into an airline seat, I couldn’t take the stress and strain of jetting about encased in a carcass of blubber like this.

‘But, going back that one short year. I found myself in the West Indies, Haiti to be exact, where the company had sent me to discuss business terms with a wealthy Spanish sugar cane farmer called Luis Ortega. Ortega was a sly cookie. He knew we were eager to clinch a deal with him, but he wasn’t going to be hurried. He was the kind of man who only did business with people he knew intimately. The outcome was that he invited me to stay with him at his hacienda while he considered all the angles.

‘I had every reason to accept his offer and that was before I met his young wife, Carla. She was a real stunner, one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever set eyes on. Her father was a Spaniard, her mother a native of the island. She was twenty years younger than her husband and bored with him. I sensed it the moment I was introduced to her.

‘We were more or less thrown into each other’s company. Ortega was often away for days at a stretch, visiting other parts of the plantation and the only other occupants of the house were the servants and an old black woman called Mama Sheba. She was a bit of a mystery that one, a wizened old crone who appeared to do no work around the place, but simply sat on the veranda, day after day, chewing tobacco and occasionally hawking into a metal spittoon.

‘Anyway, the inevitable happened. It was apparent to me that Carla found me attractive – I was slim then and was considered a handsome man. She made herself available to me and against all my better judgment I took what was on offer. I was bored, I guess, and in need of some diversion. Oh, I won’t pretend it was some great love affair. It was lust, pure and simple, on both our parts.

‘My stay at the hacienda became a dangerous game. I was torn between my business interests on the one hand and my sex drive on the other. Time and time again the latter won the day. Carla was a passion I could not, would not, resist.

‘Then I noticed that when the three of us – Ortega, Carla and myself, were together, the atmosphere felt distinctly strained. I began to fear that Mama Sheba knew what was going on and was having a quiet word in Ortega’s ear. These fears were soon confirmed. One night, after snatching a couple of hours alone with Carla, I returned to my own room to find Mama Sheba waiting for me. She was holding some kind of fetish in her hand, a filthy old wand made of animal bone and feathers. She pointed it at me and began to talk in a curious, croaking voice. It was the first and only time I ever heard her speak.’

‘The master very angry wid you,’ she told me. ‘He know what you do wid his wife. He say you go way from dis place tomorrow and don’ never come back. He no’ give you sugar cane, he no’ give you anyt’ing. He tell Mama Sheba to pay you back for what you take from him. He say you very greedy man, take what don’ belong you. Mama Sheba say, let punishment fit crime.’

‘And with that she made a curious little gesture with the fetish and padded out of the room. Of course, at the time I dismissed her words as superstitious nonsense. I left for England the next day, painfully aware that my employers would take a very dim view of me blowing what could have been a very lucrative deal, but as I soon discovered that was the least of my worries.

‘A couple of weeks after my return I began to notice changes. Little things at first. My shirts getting tight across the front, some difficulty in doing up buttons . . . I’d always kept myself fit so I stepped up my visits to the gym and cut most of the fat out of my diet. No use. I continued to put on weight, steadily, a few pounds a week. Soon my friends were really beginning to notice the difference in me.

‘I progressed to crash diets, worked myself almost to the point of collapse in the gym. Nothing worked. I went steadily from chubby to flabby and from flabby to just plain fat. Then there was the frightening realisation that the old woman’s words had been more than just gibberish. They’d done this to me. A curse, I suppose you’d call it. A hex. And there was absolutely nothing I could do to reverse the situation. Nothing. That’s the most awful thought of all, Mr Lipman. Where does it end? When will it stop?’

There was a long silence after Eddie had finished speaking. Sidney sat there, wishing there was something he could say. A thought occurred to him. ‘The old woman,’ he said. ‘This Mama Sheba. Maybe you could find her, make her undo this thing she’s put on you. I mean, if a person can put a curse on, surely they can take it off again?’

Eddie smiled sadly. ‘I’m way ahead of you, Mr Lipman. I went back to Ortega’s hacienda some three months ago. Ortega wasn’t around, but Carla was. She barely recognised me.’ Eddie shook his head, recalling the event. ‘She was as beautiful and alluring as ever, but when she looked at me I saw only revulsion in her eyes. I asked her about Mama Sheba. That’s when she told me the old woman had died a few months after I’d left the place.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Sidney. ‘But . . . surely, somebody else?’

Eddie shook his head. ‘With Carla’s help I sought out all the old Macumbah priests on the island. They all told me the same thing. There was nobody else who could remove the curse. Only the one who set it in place.’ Eddie sighed. ‘At any rate, I’m through fighting it. I’ve tried, believe me, I’ve tried. But it can’t be much longer now. The pains get worse every day. Sometimes it feels as though my body is only just holding together under the strain.’

Sidney laughed nervously. ‘But, there must be a limit to this thing,’ he reasoned. ‘Otherwise a man could just keep getting bigger and bigger until . . .’

‘Until his heart gave out,’ murmured Eddie tonelessly. ‘Or his body just burst open like a piece of rotten fruit.’

Sidney blanched. He had thought it, but had recoiled from actually speaking it aloud.

Eddie gave another sigh. With some difficulty, he stood upright and the chair seemed to creak a note of relief. He peeled off the pieces of his unfinished suit and laboriously struggled into his old one.

‘Thanks for trying,’ he told Sidney. ‘I’ll write you a cheque to cover your costs.’

‘There’s no need for that!’ Sidney assured him. ‘Look, I tell you what I’m going to do. I told you I respond to a challenge, didn’t I? So I’m going to make you a new suit, bigger, roomier than the last one. I’ll get the best cloth there is . . . good, strong stuff, maybe with lycra in it so it’ll adapt to your changing shape. What do you say?’

Eddie Small shook his head sadly. ‘You must realise that there’s no use persisting in this. I know when I’m beaten. It’s all I can do to get here from my apartment these days. I can barely squeeze on the bus and the tube is a nightmare for me.’

‘Well, don’t worry about that. I have the measurements. I’ll simply increase every dimension by three inches and make the suit up. When it’s ready, I’ll post it to you, I already have your address in the order book.’

‘I couldn’t let you go to all that trouble.’

‘No trouble, believe me! And when you outgrow that suit, just give me a ring and I’ll make the next one. We’re not going to let this thing get the better of us.’

‘You’re very kind, Mr Lipman. I appreciate this. Maybe I can pay you something in advance.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cheque book but Sidney waved it away.

‘You can forget about that,’ he said. ‘This will be my treat. I absolutely insist.’

Eddie’s face glowed with gratitude and his eyes filled with tears. ‘I . . . I don’t know what to say,’ he whispered.

‘Say nothing. Just don’t give up hope.’

The two men shook hands warmly. Then Eddie lumbered in the direction of the door.

‘Mr Small?’

Eddie turned. ‘Yes?’ he murmured.

‘I’m sorry. I really am.’

‘So am I, Mr Lipman. Well, thanks and goodbye.’

Eddie Small manoeuvred his huge body out through the narrow doorway and onto the street. Sidney watched for a few moments as he waddled away down the street, moving slowly, painfully. A small group of children spotted him and took up a chorus of ‘Fatso, fatso!’ Eddie didn’t even seem to notice them; he was probably used to such treatment by now.

Sidney went back into the shop and through a small partition to the kitchenette. He made himself his customary lunchtime coffee, but for the first time in thirty years he skipped the cream cheese bagel. He seemed to have lost his appetite.

Eddie Small paused and glanced quickly back at the entrance to Lipman’s shop. The old man was no longer watching from the doorway. Eddie grinned. Lipman’s face had been a picture at the end there and Eddie had nearly lost it completely. He hadn’t enjoyed himself so much in ages and decided that he had earned himself a little treat.

He came to a newsagents and after a cautious glance over his shoulder he ducked inside. He purchased a giant Mars bar, two Toffee Crisps, three bars of Whole Nut, a Crunchie, two Milky Ways, a Boost, a couple of Daim Bars and several packets of crisps.

He ate the lot as he waddled along Charing Cross Road, his jaws munching rhythmically, chocolate-coloured saliva dribbling down his chins. Being so greedy had its disadvantages, one of which was finding suitable apparel, but Eddie seemed to have the problem sorted now. He glanced at his watch and quickened his pace.

He had to squeeze in another two fittings before lunch.