Appetite
A Short Story
There once was a greedy little girl. She never stopped eating . Not for a minute. Weaning her was easy and the milk tooth shaped bite marks on her mother’s breasts faded after a while. Most of their friends with similar age children had to try so hard to make their offspring eat solid food. Little Sally simply ate. And ate.
She finished her rusks and her Mummy’s muesli and Daddy’s
bacon and eggs while the kettle was boiling for coffee. She ate all foods animal, vegetable and mineral including Mummy’s multi vitamins and Daddy’s Viagra. Worried, when she was three her parents took Sally to a child psychiatrist. After she ate his notepad and started on a paperback edition of Notes on Piaget‘s Theory of Child Developmental Psychology by a trendy colleague from Cambridge, he recommended her to a top therapist just off Harley Street.
“Excellent practitioner,” he assured the worried parents. “She’s a feminist, has had great results with girls of all ages. Eating disorders a speciality,” he gabbled, yanking his hand-painted Thai silk tie out of Little Sally’s mouth.
Six months and loads of money later the world-famous therapist confessed her bewilderment. ‘Obviously it’s related to your relationship,” she told Sally’s parents. “You’re a stereotypical patriarchal structured nuclear family, and Sally’s feminine Goddess Nature feels stifled.” She handed Sally’s Mum the key to the muzzle. “You can take it off at mealtimes.” She stared accusingly at Sally’s cringing Dad. “It’ll hold a ten-stone Rottweiler.” She patted Sally on the head and sidestepped the toddler’s lunge. The little girl’s co-ordination hadn’t kept pace with her appetite and the therapist, who did yoga thrice daily and had a black belt in Aikido, evaded her easily.
At her fifth birthday party, Sally ate the whole cake including the candles, ten packets of assorted crisps, nine fruit trifles in individual toddler-sized bowls, twenty- seven Linda McCartney sausages on cocktail sticks and part of her best friend’s right arm...
“We’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got,” gasped the victim’s mother. She stared in disbelief at Sally and shuddered. “Monster!”
After Sally’s Daddy, a successful derivatives trader in the City, settled out of court, the other children didn’t visit often. Years passed . Stressful years, especially for Mummy. Years of expensive treatment and massive grocery bills. By the age of ten Sally was eating about a thousand pounds’ worth of food a week. The attempted cures went from trendy to preposterous .
One Californian-trained, Hampstead-based advocate of Natural Balanced Life-Force Healing tried locking the little girl up with unlimited amounts of food on the theory that “She’ll have to adapt to a Universe of sufficiency.”
It seemed to work for a while. In fact, after a day or so of non-stop gorging, Sally hid in a wardrobe and fell into a deep sleep.
“Good,” commented the Natural Balanced Life-Force Healer. “She’ll come out when she’s ready. Now remove all foods from the house so she can’t find gratification for her unbalanced desires and we’ll force her to re-balance her appetites in perfect harmony with Nature.”
“What about the stuff in the fridge?” asked Sally’s Mum anxiously. “She broke the locks the other day to get at the honey and raisin Cornish dairy ice-cream.”
“Oh, I’ll give that to the homeless people under Waterloo Bridge,” said the Natural Balanced Life-Force Healer.
“Anyhow the whole point is to not keep snack foods in the house. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Sally needs to learn to forage for her needs and realise she can’t gorge on refrigerated junk foods any longer.” So (almost) as good as his word he took six Tupperware boxes of New Zealand green-lipped mussels, Jerusalem artichokes, Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, fillet steak and seedless organic grapes with him in his Nissan Micra, along with three bottles of Chenin Blanc and a jar of Fortnum and Mason’s free-range goose liver pate.
“Leave the fridge on defrost”, he advised, tucking Sally’s Dad’s cheque in the pocket of his hand-woven cotton shirt, “she’ll come out when she’s ready.”
When she was ready Sally did indeed emerge, looking for food. But in accordance with Natural Balanced Life-Force Healing doctrine there was now nothing edible in the house.
Deeply unhappy, Sally went next door and cried piteously until the childless neighbours took her to the nearest Sainsbury’s. Sally then hid in her tree house for the next four days with two carrier bags full of sweets, pies, cheeses and prosciutto, her Walkman and her favourite Alanis Morisette CDs.
On the third morning, after spending most of the night on the phone being reassured by the Natural Balanced Life-Force Healer, Sally’s parents attended to their own needs by getting in the Mercedes and driving to Heathrow to fly to Barbados for a short break. Sally was left with a Swedish au pair named Margarethe who spent the day trying to tempt her down with smoked salmon dumplings and Black Forest Gateaux.
Unfortunately for her, she succeeded all too well.
“I WANT MORE!” howled Sally, fingers hooked into little claws as she chased the kind-hearted Swede into the house and up the mahogany staircase. Desperate, Margarethe fumbled with the telephone extension in the marble-tiled bathroom while pushing the bleached pine laundry-chest up against the door. A rhythmic banging began as Sally hurled herself against the solid oak.
The Fire Brigade rescued Margarethe via the bathroom window using their extension ladder while a high-pressure jet of cold water kept Sally at bay. A small article appeared in the Gazette the following Thursday. Sally’s Dad had a few beers with the editor and there were no further stories.
One day just after Sally turned thirteen, a distant cousin from America came to stay. For a while, Sally’s mother breathed a sigh of relief.
“Someone for her to talk to. Someone her own age…”
The cousin’s name was Martha. From upstate New York, she was a born-again Christian of fifteen summers with plump, strawberry and cream features and blonde hair plaited halfway down her back. She had heard that Sally had an eating Problem.
Jesus, she declared, would help control her binge eating. Greed, she earnestly assured Sally, was the worst of sins and a sure-fire road to Damnation. A deadly sin in the eyes of God.
Sally’s liberal education had omitted much reference to judgement and Hell-fire. She was deeply impressed and upset, shocked… and quite frightened. Did God, she wondered, have a telescope with which he scanned the world like the birdwatchers in the meadow? It would have to be very powerful. Did he see everyone all at once? He would need a million eyes… A million high-powered telescopes filled Sally’s imagination, all seeking out greedy little girls who would roast forever in Hell… like meats at a barbecue…
“And if you won’t get your act together and quit overeating,” Martha assured Sally, “why then the Devil’s going to roast you forever on his big toasting-fork in Hell-“
“Like the sausages Daddy does on the barby?” Interrupted Sally.
“Yeah, I guess… Anyhow you got to listen…”
Martha’s big blue eyes brimmed with near-tears for Sally’s endangered soul.
The shrill transatlantic voice rose higher and Sally’s head began spinning… Visions of leering demons waving toasting forks through clouds of smoke dancing round a giant barbecue stove filled her head and suddenly dizzy Sally sat down on her bed. The packet of Barbecue Bacon Crisps popped under her weight and their aroma assailed her nostrils. Million-pound budgets had hired a hundred highly skilled chemists and superbly equipped laboratories to plumb the mysteries of Flavour Science for the crisp company. Those aroma molecules were the product of the twenty-first century’s finest science, computer-optimized to trigger the human appetite. Not that Sally’s appetite needed much help. Deep in the teenager’s limbic cortex, ancient and primeval instincts were released. Salivary ducts dilated. Stomach acids began flowing. Sally smiled sweetly at her plump blonde New York cousin.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
Afterwards, Sally burped and patted her lips with Martha’s silk hanky from Sachs of Fifth Avenue. Then she put her cousin’s bones neatly in the matched Louis Vuitton calf-hide suitcase and flight-bag covered in Pan Am and JFK-LHR airport baggage stickers. Looking through the hand-stitched crocodile handbag for dessert she found only two peppermint bonbons, a box of tampons and a photo album. Curious, she flipped through the pictures. Bunches of Americans looked out at her. Martha’s friends and schoolmates. Big, beefy, well-fed Americans. Sally smiled slowly. She knew where she was going next summer holiday now. She’d found her destiny, her metier. Feeling a sense of belonging for the first time she could remember, Sally grinned. Then laughed, and skipped joyfully around the room as she unwrapped the peppermints. It was sooo good to know what you wanted in Life.