The Flying Goat by H.E. Bates

for decency. She didn’t need support. It was a figure that had stepped straight out of advertisements.
    Mrs. Victor looked down at her own squabbed-out thighs, like two vast aerated sausages, and felt like weeping. She could not bear it, and looked back at the girl.
    Ask her if she diets. Somehow she looks as if she diets. That sort of thinness can’t be natural. There’s thinness and thinness. Somehow she looks as if she must diet.
    Mrs. Victor hesitated to speak. She had seen the scorn, before now, in the faces of the young. She didn’t want to speak and then have it thrown back in her face. Then she looked again at the girl. You could have blown her away with a breath. She had the ethereal lightness you saw spoken of in advertisements. There was nothing on her.
    More children had appeared on the lake-edge, with more bread, so that the air was filled with a shrieking storm of gull-wings. Mrs. Victor said:
    â€˜Excuse me. I’ve been looking at your figure, and wondering – ’
    â€˜Eh?’ The girl, startled, turned her extraordinarily thin face. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hear for the birds.’
    For a moment the birds quietened. Mrs. Victor said:
    â€˜I hope you’ll excuse my speaking to you. I’ve been looking at your figure. Wondering if you did anything special for it. If you dieted. You see how I am.’
    â€˜No,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t do anything special.’
    â€˜Oh!’
    Mrs. Victor, not knowing how to go on, smiled. The girl’s profile looked as though it had been pared down by a knife.
    â€˜I’ve got so desperate now,’ she said, ‘that I’m thinking of seriously starving.’ It did not sound right. ‘Starving seriously,’ she said.
    If she thinks I’m going to sit here, the girl thought, and listen, she’s crazy. Not me. I’m going. I’ll go straight away. She sat quite still. If I get up, she thought, I think I shall fall down.
    â€˜Really starving.’ Mrs. Victor went into an explanation of the word, moving slightly along the seat. ‘You know. Days without food.’
    â€˜I know.’
    â€˜I’m sick of food. Sick of it.’ Mrs. Victor began to explain who she was, how, being who she was, she had to attend dinners, functions, eating, always eating, eating until now, at last, she was utterly sick of eating. ‘Take last night. The dinner began at eight and we were still eating at half-past nine. Still eating!’
    The girl sat trying to think of something to say. She could think of nothing but her suspender belt. It felt loose on her body. It will fall off, she thought, if I move. I’ve altered the hooks once already. I shall have to alter them again.
    â€˜First there was some special sort of cheese, Norwegian or something, on rye-biscuit. As if we needed that. Then soup,
consommé
or
crême
, just the usual thing. Then fish. Fish I should have liked, but it was messed up with spaghetti and sauce and egg and I can’t think what. All fattening things. And that’s how it went on. Duck, pheasant, chicken – and I was so sick of them I tried venison. Have you ever eaten venison? My husband was having it and he said I should try it. I couldn’t eat it. I can’t explain what it tastes like – but queer, somehow. An acquired taste. You’ve never tried it?’
    â€˜No,’ the girl said, ‘I can’t say I have.’
    â€˜Don’t.’
    I could eat an elephant, the girl thought. I could eat bacon-rind. She sat thinking of bacon-rind. People didn’t eat it. They cut it off, but if you did fry it, it jumped in the frying-pan like snakes.
    â€˜If you multiply that by hundreds you’ll see what I have to go through in a year,’ Mrs. Victor said.
    Multiply it by hundreds. Like snakes. Snakes lay eggs, hundreds of eggs. The girl remembered going, long ago, to the zoo, and then giving whole bananas to