Leith, William Read Online Free PDF Page A

would lie on my back which, being fat, I preferred anyway and she would lower herself on top of me, and then tell me to do a specific thing. I felt I had to get it exactly right. When she was finished, she'd give me an opportunity to finish, and then she'd get up quickly, slightly flushed, and put her underwear back on. Afterwards she wouldn't talk about it, as if it had never happened. Sometimes I would do the specific thing slightly wrong and she'd be furious she'd get up suddenly, angry, and put her underwear back on, and that would be that. Once I had to stop doing the specific thing because I got a cramp in my hand.
    `What are you doing?'
    `I'm sorry.'
    `Well, I can't go on now,' she said. Then she got up, put her underwear back on, and walked out of the room.
    My Montignac diet went well. I stopped eating carbs. I stopped being hungry. Every day, I had some fruit for breakfast, and for lunch I boiled up a lot of frozen broccoli and frozen Brussels sprouts, which I ate with salt and pepper and a little butter. The weight dropped off. I lost 10 lbs in the first three weeks. Still Sadie withheld sex. But she said she'd have sex with me on my birthday.
    I didn't know how to feel about this. Girls had said this sort of thing to me before, but that was when I was a teenager. Even so, I had to admit I was excited. I had got thinner. Maybe Sadie felt better about me. Maybe our arguments would stop. Maybe the troublesome hell that was our relationship would get better. On the day itself, we went into the bedroom. I lay on the bed. Sadie closed the curtains. It was afternoon. I kept my shirt on, but unbuttoned it. Lying down, in the shady room, I looked ... chubby. Not too bad. Sadie took her clothes off, and arranged her slim body over mine, her knees outside my hips. She lowered herself, but not quite the full distance. I started doing the specific thing. From the start, I could tell I was doing it right. After a while, she was finished. But I hadn't started. Then she got up, put her underwear on, and stood in the middle of the room, getting dressed.
    I said, 'Why did you do that?'
    She said, 'Oh, come on. I've had enough of this. You said you wanted to go to the cinema. So let's go to the cinema.'
    When we got to the cinema, there were no films she wanted to see. It didn't seem to matter that there were lots of films I wanted to see. I was too fat. She was in charge. My fat had reduced me to the ranks. Soon after that, I stopped Montignac altogether. I stuffed myself with bagels, croissants, thick slices of white toast and butter, and bars of chocolate. I started putting sugar in my coffee again. And my drinking took off. If you'd asked me about Montignac, I'd have said that, sure, I believed in the principles. It was just that, somehow, it hadn't worked. I was fat before Montignac, and fat afterwards. It was a diet. It had no palpable effect. So what was new?
    Thinking about this makes me feel a rising sense of something bad, a nameless dread, something I don't like at all, and I eat some more pretzels and drink some coffee and ask for more coffee and land at JFK airport and buy a Hershey bar after I get through customs and marvel, briefly, at the way I still buy a Hershey bar when I land in America, even though I could buy a Hershey bar any day of the week in the deli across the street from my flat in London. I eat the Hershey bar, which is not the exciting, semi-mythical experience I want it to be, in three bites.

Carb City
    I take a cab across the bridge to Manhattan. Here it is Carb City, one of the world's great carbohydrate centres. Here, the buildings rise up out of a bed of carbs. Follow each gleaming hive down to the ground and there it is, at the bottom a
    starch-crammed deli or diner, a pharmacy groaning with crispy snacks and cookies and breakfast cereal. This is a place where_ you can get yourself carbed up in any style you want you can give yourself a blood-sugar spike with doughnuts and bagels and croissants