Fat American Pig

KrreeekggghhDDDDDUUMMMM

The cafe’s door groaned then screamed as it was forced open as far as possible before thudding into the door stop. The metallic cry scraped itself into George’s ears causing him to look up from The London Review of Books with a sigh of annoyance. Once confronted by the source of this unwanted interruption the sigh became a breathy retch of repulsion as George’s nimble thoughts on EM Forster were replaced by a thudding disgust.

Fat American Pig.

The man (if you could call him such) stood in the doorway his broad, shapeless shoulders pressing against both sides of the door’s frame. There was something distinctly porcine about his appearance and pose: Not only was he fat, corpulent, obese, but his expression was one of dumbfounded hesitation, like a pig about to enter an abattoir, slowly suspecting the horrors beyond the threshold.

Jesus, what is his problem? George thought to himself. Hasn’t he been to a cafe before or does he only know ‘diners’ and ‘coffee shops’?

The Pig remained in the doorway, sweat dripping down out of the rim of his hat and onto his pudgy red face. George was drawn to the horrors of this scene and noticed that the cap was from The Hard Rock Cafe in Leicester Square.

Typical American, travels across the Atlantic only to dine at the same vile chains smeared across his own ugly country.

Having deduced that the cafe was no abattoir the Pig gracelessly stumbled into the cafe towards the counter, allowing George to take in the full offence of its appearance.

Where to begin? Firstly, the man was much fatter than George had originally dared to think. The doorway had clearly been acting as some kind of steel corset and now free of its pressures the Pig’s fat was free to wobble and roam, restrained and concealed by only an ineffectual layer of clothing.

My God, how did this thing even fit on the plane? How many seats must it have taken up? How could it afford the tickets? It certainly can’t be engaged in any kind of profession. Who could ever take such a pudgy stack of blankness seriously? Maybe it got a payout from some trashy fast food chain as compensation for its obesity. . .

Secondly, the clothes. The Pig had clearly got dressed in the dark, or at the very least without the aid of a mirror, for there had seemingly been no attempt made to coordinate the colours of the garments in even the most half hearted of ways: The shoes were off white; the trousers some autistic camouflage pattern of greens; the T Shirt sexually frustrated purple and the hat the burgundy of serious internal bleeding.

Apart from the trainers, which were obnoxiously large, none of the clothes seemed to fit the pig. Even American clothes have an upper size limit so it seemed. The trousers runched up and around the upper thighs before sagging ever so slightly at the knees and then battling again against the near cylindrical deformities of the Pig’s calf and ankle. The T Shirt was stretched to the limit of its fibres across a violent ocean of flab and was too short to completely cover the pocked flesh of the lower stomach, which defiantly protruded over the long suffering waist band of the trousers, presenting itself to George’s eye line.

This was all too much for George and he bowed his head, beaten by the onslaught of fattened, tasteless, aggressive America. The disgusting America of ‘fifteen minutes of fame’; all you can eat; meaningless words; missing vowels; empty air kisses; film adaptations of children’s toys; plagiarism; franchises; famous for doing and being nothing; no personal responsibility; no dignity; mindless, endless cycles of production and consumption; novelty; pseudo intellectualism; pornography masquerading as art masquerading as pornography; non entities thinking that people care about their tawdry problems. . . Fat American Pigs rolling in swill, impossibly fecund, endlessly fucking.

But it wasn’t just America that disgusted George. Now forty five years old, it seemed as if his life was constantly accompanied by an internal din of disdainful disgust. It wasn’t that he was a snob, far from it, George knew the beauty of tower blocks and trees and in his more naive moments romanticised lives lived ten stories high and within six street worlds. It just seemed as if the world was full of moments of minor ugliness; missing apostrophes; mispronunciations; loose ties; bare midrifts; exposed underwear; spilt liquids; vomit and vermin and nobody cared to fix them. Together it all combined to form a tortuously unrelenting backdrop of aesthetic violence, jabbing constantly at George’s refined sensibilities and filling him with a sour dread.
Other people, however, seemed to be oblivious to the ugliness, leading George to question the humanity of those around him. How could they not be affected by all the filth and carelessness? Are they really that numbed and self absorbed that they’re unable to notice the constant hideousness of it all? Maybe they’re just better at hiding it, empty smiles and meaningless chatter concealing the same spiralling pain.

The Pig had made its way to the counter and back and was now sitting at a table, directly in front of George. The spindly wire legs of the chair creaked and scraped against the floor as they struggled to support the Pig’s mass and the thin edge of the tabletop sliced deep into the flesh. The violent ugliness put George in mind of the aftermath of an explosion; collapsed buildings; the dead and dying; blood; limbs; panic.
The din increased in George’s head making him nauseous.

Trying to calm himself George shifted in his seat so that he now faced the counter. Too unnerved to return to the article, George found himself watching the girl behind the counter. As she moved around, George slowly began to recognise her undeniable beauty. It was in the sight and sound of her movements – the flapping of the shapeless dress, the slight slapping of the shoes on the tiles, the bending of her back and limbs - the smoothness of her skin, the rounded benevolence of her features, the dark hair falling out of her headband.

He watched and listened intently, detecting a Spanish accent as she took customers’
orders. “Croissant”, “Cappuccino”, “Latte”, “Syrup”. George listened and listened. The Pig was no longer in the room. It was George, the Girl, everything else was silence.

Another waitress whispered something to the Girl and she nodded and walked outside. George’s head pivoted around following her across the cafe and out of the door.

“Cute girrrrlll, huh?”

The Pig had spoken, a slow, dull drawl.

“Sorry”

George replied, shocked that the Pig was talking to him.

“The girrrll. She’s cute, right? Maaannn if you and I were twenty years younger, right?”

George stared at the Pig, trying to muster a forced smile, words having long abandoned him.

He wasn’t alone. He was a Pig. Just like everyone else.

.