Lucy only went with thin men: the thinner the better.
She liked her guys to look like lab skeletons in flesh-coloured body suits. For her, there was nothing better than the sight and feel of elbows, ribs, tibulas, fibulas, sternums and vertebrae jutting through skin. If she could circle her little finger and thumb around a man’s ankles or wrists, she would moan with pleasure. Hollow eyes, sunken cheeks and bony backsides were her osteopathic catnip. The problem was: the country was getting fatter. Skinnies were thin on the ground. Despite scouring bars and clubs three nights a week, Lucy had not met anyone thin enough to shag for eight months.
She was getting desperate.
Things got so bad that she found herself, with enormous shame, being aroused by a documentary about a famine in East Africa. It was as she watched a stick-thin man struggling to his feet, that it struck her: Britain didn’t have famine, but it did have anorexia. And some of those anorexics were men.
She met Steve outside the Eating Disorders Clinic. He wore baggy clothes to hide his condition, but Lucy could see he was emaciated. After a drink at a nearby pub (red wine for her, low calorie Coke for him) they went back to her house and made love. Lying with him afterwards and stroking his ribcage like a xylophone, Lucy asked him about his condition. “This is the best I’ve been for five years” he said “I’m eating two meals a day and my counsellor says I could be up to nine stone by Christmas!” Lucy’s heart sank.
Then an idea struck her.
Every day she saw Steve, she subtly dropped hints about his weight. “Looking a bit podgy around the middle!” “Come here, wobble-bottom” “Jesus Christ, is there a walrus in the bath?” It worked. Within two months, Steve was once again convinced that his eight stones frame was an obese, disgusting mass. As she lay in bed, listening to Steve vomiting up the crackers and low fat cheese he had had for Sunday lunch, Lucy smiled. She would love Steve with all her heart, till death would them part.
She reckoned three or four months, at the most.
