Free Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber

would be her eventual cause of death, and thrombosis was the favourite. Miss Fatt had heard one of them prophesy as much, while he was kneeling at her feet, examining her blubberous legs. He smelled strongly of anaftershave which Miss Fatt had once nuzzled in a TV commercial. Perhaps the seductive eyes, the bee-stung lips, the subtle cleavage of her former body had persuaded him to try that aftershave, once upon a time. Now here he was, dwarfed by her mass, telling her she would die soon of thrombosis. She ignored him, secure in the knowledge that she would not die of thrombosis or anything else he could understand: she would die of her unique condition. Only at mealtimes did she glimpse death, knowing that the food she wished for so desperately would kill her by and by.
    Miss Thinne was supposed to be dying in an inner-city cancer hospital, but on this Christmas night, taking advantage of the relaxed security procedures on Jesus’s birthday, she was instead able to be elsewhere.
    She was in a taxi speeding towards Miss Fatt’s hospital.
    Her ischia, jutting out through her fleshless buttocks, made shallow dents in the cab’s back seat as she excreted the last of the intravenous fluids from which she had disconnected herself hours before. A stolen overcoat hid from the driver’s notice both her nakedness and the fact that she was too wasted to live much longer.
    Having reached the hospital gates, Miss Thinne swung open the cab door and limped without paying into the dense, unlit greenery. There she waited, not breathing, listening for the sound of the taxi driving away.
    As soon as the air was silent she walked up to the long cast-iron fence and slipped through the bars, needing only to shed her coat to achieve this feat of insubstantiality.
    She didn’t need to be told where Miss Fatt lay imprisoned: this final meeting was as inevitable as the metamorphoses themselves.
    ‘Suzie’
    Miss Fatt’s slit eyes looked up at the high but unbarred window and saw, poking through there, the face and arms of her companion. Only the hair and skin lent some recognisable individuality to what was otherwise the common human skeleton.
    ‘You’ve come,’ squeaked Miss Fatt.
    Miss Thinne heaved herself on to the window-ledge like a nightmarish white praying mantis, and lowered her spindly legs carefully down into the dark and humid room. Her forklike feet dangled more than a metre from Miss Fatt’s helplessly supine body.
    ‘Can’t reach,’ panted Miss Thinne.
    ‘Just let yourself fall.’
    Surrendering her balance on the window-ledge, Miss Thinne allowed herself to drop, landing safely on the soft mound of flesh below.
    Sprawled on top of Miss Fatt, who had so very much flesh and no discernible bones, while she had such very obvious bones and hardly any discernible flesh, she understood for the first time that the way they had become alienated from each other was strangely natural, like the separation of liquid from solid in curdling milk.
    Both exhausted, they lay together, silent, while in the corridors outside, Christmas carols were sung to those patients for whom there was deemed to be some hope of remission. A faraway firework lit up the outside world and cast a rectangle of bright light on Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne. For the last time they tried to use their estranged bodies to show their love for one another, but for the first time this proved impossible.
    ‘I’m so hungry,’ lamented Miss Fatt, the tears trapped in swollen creases at the corners of her eyes. ‘But I know that if I eat anymore, even one more thing, I’ll die. I mean it.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘My heart will just stop.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you? ’
    ‘Me? I’ve … had enough.’ This statement alone drained Miss Thinne perfectly white, her pitiful reserve of moisture and pigment apparently exhaled along with the words. Then finally:
    ‘There it goes …’
    She meant the last of the contents that had nourished her, and indeed her body started