THE WINTER MONTHS IN COMELY Bank were always difficult. It was dark when people woke up, when they ate their breakfasts, when they left their homes. Daylight was something that happened while they sat in a shop or office or school. They might catch ten minutes of frail sun at lunchtime, but it was too cold to linger outside. By four o’clock the moon was large in the sky and frighteningly low, as if part of the earth were seeking to return.
That final winter was no exception. People stayed home as much as possible. They went out only for food. If they met on the street, in Mr. Asham’s, conversation was brief.
But it would be inaccurate to say nothing happened during that time. The slackening pace gave everyone the chance to reflect. They thought about what they’d done during the year that had passed, what they’d do in the future.
Caitlin decided to leave Comely Bank.
Mrs. Maclean vowed to help more people.
Toby decided to eat less.
Mr. Asham decided to start seeing Trudy three times a week.
Sinead decided to drug Sam.
Sam started trying to get Trudy a passport.
After a period of deep reflection, Alasdair began drinking his urine.
But there were obstacles. Sinead didn’t know which drug to use; Sam had no idea how to get a fake passport; Mr. Asham had to stop seeing Trudy after his wife found short black hairs on his shop coat. As for Caitlin, she read travel guides and looked at brochures but did not book a flight. Only Alasdair was able to start his plan immediately.
Toby’s plan had its origins in his visit to Sam’s shop. After Sinead saw how the cookbook calmed him, she bought him others. During that autumn she read the recipes to Toby, showed him the photos, talked about how the dishes might taste. But whatever had happened in the bookshop that day was not repeated. His hunger was unchanged. Perhaps this was why Sinead stopped reading to him.
The more likely explanation is that she was too obsessed with Sam. In addition to following him and waiting outside his shop, she took pictures of him on her phone at every opportunity. Most were partial, blurry images, but this did not matter: Each photo was a piece of him. Instead of reading to Toby, she looked at these pictures on her phone till she was squirming in her seat, crossing her legs, smoothing her hands down her thighs. Only when her desire reached wonderful, torturous levels did she return her attention to Toby. Even with Sam’s face before her, Toby put her off sex.
When Toby returned to the cookbooks in February 2017, it surprised Evelyn and Sinead. Toby could not read and rarely enjoyed looking at pictures. Yet now he spent hours gazing at the cookbooks. This had no effect on the way he ate—he still cleared his plate in a ravenous manner—but he stopped asking for food at other times. He no longer tested the locks on the cupboards or went through the rubbish. He did not cry or beg.
Toby’s self-discipline had dramatic results. By the end of February, he had lost twenty kilograms. By the middle of March, he had lost a further five kilograms, bringing him down to 139 kilograms. Though still obese, he was no longer elephantine.
Sinead couldn’t understand why the cookbooks were working. The crucial difference, I suspect, was that Toby now wanted to eat less, but this only begs the further question of why. Sinead wondered if he was jealous of her feelings for Sam; perhaps he was trying to lose weight so she’d find him attractive.
That she could even consider this notion speaks volumes about Sinead’s inflated idea of her attractiveness. Toby had no sexual inclinations, not even towards himself. When he got an erection he guffawed and pointed at his crotch.
It is interesting to compare the different urges of Toby and Sinead. Both were primal needs that seemed irresistible. Yet throughout history there have been people who abstained from sex or eating, even (in the latter case) to the point of death. In virtually all these cases some political or spiritual motive was able to override these desires. But although Sinead admitted that she had a problem, nothing she could think or do made any lasting difference. In some respects her situation was that of the world writ small. At the start of this century our societies were in constant crisis. The ice caps were melting; the stock markets kept crashing; the gap between rich and poor was widening every second. We were running out of trees, fossil fuels, fish, and clean water. There was perpetual war.
Everyone knew about these problems; they were topics of daily conversation. Yet few people were prepared to change the way they lived. It was essential that they were able to speak to their friends at any time. If they couldn’t eat bananas, or fly on jet planes, they would rather die. Their problem was the same as Sinead’s: They simply lacked the will.
If it seems ludicrous to equate the plight of a young nymphomaniac with that of the entire world, that is entirely fitting. An absurd comparison for an absurd situation.
If she could not change, if they could not change, how did poor mentally challenged Toby manage to overcome his craving?
These are the wrong questions. They assume that the decision to want and eat less was made by a conscious mind with plans and intentions, i.e., by Toby. Given his somewhat limited mental capacities, it makes more sense to give the credit to his body. Perhaps it suddenly realised it could not expect to function much longer at its present size. Never mind that his body did not actually “realise” this fact, or “decide” to make him eat less, at least not in the way these terms are used when speaking of sentient beings. We need not speak of intention or purpose. The body has ways of restoring balance, which though they may appear goal-directed, with a clear end in mind, are in fact just emergent properties of the system as a whole. For example, when a pregnancy is spontaneously aborted, it is often due to a conflict over resources between the mother and foetus. When the stability of the mother’s body is threatened—for instance, by the foetus utilising too much of the available blood sugar—the mother’s pancreas will automatically secrete more insulin, thus reducing the amount of glucose available to the foetus, which can lead to its death. This is done without ill will: It is regulation.
There are such patterns and mechanisms within all systems. Though we need not speak of “design” or “purpose” when discussing their properties, sometimes they perform a function that an impartial observer—who desired only the greatest good—might think desirable. This could range from reducing a chronically obese person’s interest in food, to increasing the height of the tree line, or even something like the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that destroyed the dinosaurs which had arrogantly ruled the land for really far too long.
In Toby’s case, he was saved by whatever property of his digestive or nervous system led to the metabolic and behavioural changes that reduced his appetite. Though we might wonder at the timing—why, after so many years, did this internal switch get flicked?—the mechanism that caused it was as blind as those superheated rocks that struck the earth. No matter that he began losing weight at a crucial time: In the weeks before Toby’s dramatic change, Sinead caught his mother wrapping a tea towel tightly round his neck on several occasions. Although she did not know her predecessor’s suspicions (Sinead and Mortimer never met; she thought Trudy worked in the Thai restaurant), the furtive look on the old woman’s face was enough to make Sinead suspect Evelyn was losing what little patience she had left. However, let me repeat, we should not be swayed by how fortuitously timed, and probably life saving, Toby’s diet was. Likewise, we should not take the apparent precision with which the meteors struck what was then North America, Europe, and Australia, and nowhere else (excepting the small fragment that struck poor Socotra, “The Island of Bliss,” whose people had never attacked or enslaved anyone, and which had such beautiful trees) as anything other than one of a set of equally probable patterns of impact. And to those who still insist this was a balancing of the karmic books, let me point out that there were plenty of spared nations with an equally inglorious history. I would like to think, if I may dare—postulating the eradication of several billion people is a thorny proposition—that if the meteors had struck elsewhere, the eventual outcome would have been the same. Decades of shock and rebuilding; a fairer, better world.
However, just because that tragic, awful loss of life was ultimately a good thing does not mean it was willed or caused by any entity, force, or power. Though it was, in many ways, a perfect solution to the problems of early twenty-first-century Earth (though one that no government or supranational body could advocate, let alone accomplish), if there was some entity or force capable of such a thing, why had he/she/it/they waited so long before intervening in humanity’s affairs? Why had they let things deteriorate to the point where only the deaths of billions of people could effect meaningful change?
Most Believers’ explanations are versions of the idea that only a catastrophic loss of life could teach us the lessons we needed to learn. The deaths of millions had proved insufficient. There was no war we could not forget, no famine we could not ignore.
This is probably true. But there is still no need to posit an invisible hand hurling those meteors. It could have been, as I already said, a lucky accident. I also wonder what kind of warped mind feels it necessary to destroy two billion people in order to unite the remaining five billion, when presumably it could have just as easily restored the ozone layer, cleaned up the seas, and crashed the financial markets so badly they would never recover. Admittedly, this entity would have had to do far more if those two billion people were still alive—such as remove our ability to digest meat, stop air travel for several decades, eradicate corporations, form a nonhierarchical world government, and mix the populations of different countries so thoroughly that there were almost no places with dominant ethnic groups and ultimately, no countries, at least not in the classic we-are-one-nation-and-everyone-else-must-die sense of the word. But for a quasi-omnipotent being, this probably wouldn’t have been more than a few hours’ work.
But if this hypothetical, all-powerful entity were responsible for our collective salvation, then it is only a small logical step to conclude that it was responsible for everything that happened during those final days. That it chose to kill the good people and beautiful trees of Socotra. That it put Mr. Asham on a plane to safety but not his wife and child. The motivations for this are unfathomable. Why, for instance, was Toby freed from his great hunger when the end was so near? What was the point of saving him from his mother if this reprieve was to be temporary?
The only answer I can accept is that it made the people who cared for Toby happy. His mother was delighted; only the most twisted, unfit parents take no pleasure in their child’s achievements. Her relief must have been twofold. Toby had done the impossible, and she would not need to commit an unforgivable act.
Sinead was almost as pleased. She had spent most of her year with Toby trying to achieve this. Sitting with him during his TV programmes, stopping him from going through the rubbish, trying to keep him distracted. Spending hundreds of hours reading to him about the worm that ate and ate because it wanted to fly. Telling him, over and over, that the worm in his tummy had to be starved so it would leave, so it could eat, so it could be a butterfly.
Given how much time and effort she had spent, it was entirely understandable that Sinead took most of the credit (even if it was not down to her, but Toby’s body, or perhaps that invisible hand). At the end of March, when Toby’s weight was down to 130 kilograms his mother threw her arms around Sinead and sobbed. Never had she seemed less like an old witch.
That month Sinead’s pay packet contained an additional two hundred pounds. She used it to buy new clothes and the different drugs she was thinking of using on Sam. She wanted to know how he’d be feeling when under their influence. Did Toby’s transformation make her happy? Was it like a shiny ring on her finger she could not take her eyes off?
When I think of Caitlin’s many troubles—her skin problems, her infatuation with Sam—there is at least the consolatory knowledge that she still found pleasure, or at least escape, in books or walks by the canal. Her unhappiness was an understandable reaction to having a physical disfigurement in an incredibly superficial culture; without it, I am certain she would have been no more unhappy than anyone else.
Sinead didn’t have this kind of release. She did not read, and her musical taste was limited to what she had listened to at school. Like many people, she watched a lot of television, but in a more indiscriminate fashion than most. She had no female friends, and her relationships with the men she knew were primarily physical. She must, of course, have had those small moments of euphoric joy that everyone has privately, when she glimpsed the sea between buildings, or got in a bath so perfectly hot it made her bones give thanks. Even Mrs. Maclean and the sour Mr. Campbell must have had such interludes, though it would be naïve (and perhaps insulting) to claim these brief moments made their lives less miserable.
So there is all the more reason for hoping Toby’s transformation made Sinead happy. I can imagine her doing some mundane task like tidying Toby’s room, or vacuuming the lounge, feeling tired and somewhat bored, worrying that Sam was talking to some unconventionally beautiful girl from Denmark or Croatia with charmingly inflected English, a compelling neurosis, and very firm, high breasts. In her diary she imagined them fucking, sitting in cafés, holding hands and kissing as they walked past her.
But there must have been times when she looked over and saw Toby reading quietly, and this derailed her train of thought. Perhaps the knowledge that she had helped him was a small, bright thing.
What Toby thought about losing so much weight is difficult to say. Hunger had ruled his life for so long; what was it like to lose that obsession? To have so many seconds not coloured by want? The people of Comely Bank would probably ask us the same thing.
Although Toby would have struggled with such questions, there was no doubt how losing so much weight made him feel. Everyone could see the change. He’d had a bounding enthusiasm; his laughter had been panting, delighted, prone to induce hiccups. In place of this joyful, swollen child was an overweight man in his thirties. He was like one of those patients who has drastic, life-saving surgery that is deemed a great success, delighting relatives, friends, and doctors—everyone except the patient. They feel so drained, so hacked at, they’re unsure it was worthwhile. There was an air of loss around Toby, and with good reason. Our body is the world we know best; its changes are supposed to be gradual. In three months he had lost a third of his. He must have felt like a different person.