Free The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh Page B

especially at the start. So phone me if you feel yourself going off the rails. We are fighting an addiction to crappy eating habits as well as poor exercise ones, I explain, thinking of Michelle’s wise words. — We are looking at the whole picture. You didn’t put this weight on in one day, and it won’t come off in one day.
    — I know . . . it makes sense.
    — Good. It’s important we’re on the same page here. So, tell me about you. What do you do for a living?
    — I’m . . . Sorenson hesitates, — . . . sort of an artist.
    Sort of an artist.
Everybody in SoBe who isn’t
sort of
a model or
sort of
a photographer, is
sort of
an artist. Waitress, I get it. Or maybe a trust-fund parasite, playing at it. — Cool. . . . Where are you from?
    — Minnesota. A town called Potters Prairie in Otter County.
    Are you fucking kidding me?
— Right . . . I’ll bet it’s a pretty part of the world.
    — Yes, Sorenson says, and starts talking about Potters Prairie, before going back to the fucking causeway incident, which seems to have scarred that fat bitch more than it has me. — I can’t believe how strong you were on the Julia Tuttle. I need some of that strength and determination.
    — Yes, but you aren’t a vampire and I’m not a blood bank, I snap. I’ve long recognized I can ride out an occasional contemptuous outburst, as my clients, in common with most of the fat, possess a considerable ability to edit out the uncomfortable. — Inner strength and focus is in all of us. My job is to help bring it out and develop it. To enable you find that explosive part of yourself that you are, for some reason, keeping buried, I tell her, and glance at the clock on the wall, suddenly anxious to get away from this social leech. — Right, I should go.
    Sorenson rocks on the balls of her feet, evidently wanting me to hang around. — Oh, yes . . . right. You, um, didn’t tell me where you were from?
    No dice, fat girl; some of us have lives. — Boston originally. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go, I tell her, throwing my stuff into my bag, — and you really should shower now before you start to cool down too much under the air conditioning, and I head toward the exit, only whiplashing back to chide the crestfallen chubster, — Remember, watch what you eat!
    Outside, there’s a sweet, cooling ocean breeze, and I go at a brisk trot across Flamingo Park, wanting to put as much distance between myself and that social predator as possible. Then, at the top end of Lenox, I see a grubby fuck with a camera dangling from his neck, hanging around outside my apartment block. What the fuck is this prick doing here? The show is long over! There’s always some lone loser trying to work an angle, some fucking intrusive psycho . . .
    Slowing down, I walk up quietly behind him. I tap his shoulder. The greasy prick turns around. — Lucy, he shouts, reaching for his camera.
    I tear it out of the cocksucker’s hand, the band slipping over his head, and hurl it into the road. On impact, a small black piece snaps off it. — FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!
    — My fucking cam— He looks at me in horror, then runs to retrieve the battered device.
    As he cradles it in the street, as if it were the child victim of a hit-and-run, I take the opportunity to get in through the front door, a barrage of insults shrieking behind me.
    In the apartment, I head straight for the shower. I touched that paparazzi creep’s shoulder and could feel the grubbiness from his filthy cum-splattered and nicotine-caked paw on that fucking camera. I’m just drying off when I get a call. — Lucy, it’s Lena Sorenson.
    Fuck. Like, already, dude? It was evidently a mistake to give this creepy little porker my number. — Yes? I sharply intone.
    — I think you should switch on the TV . . . Channel 6.
    I comply with the Porky Princess of Potters Prairie (seriously, who the fuck comes from a place called
that
?) and spark the TV into action. The depressed set finally kicks in.