It was by the strangest coincidence that as Henry Pyne was falling to a surely inevitable death he should meet Dulcie Prentice floating upwards to her own somewhat more delayed but just as inevitable death in the upper atmosphere. Stranger still that they should meet so far from where they had first known each other.
Both had worked for Raymond Raiment. Henry as the in-house knitting-machine mechanic and general Mr. Fixit, Dulcie in the office. Neither had spoken to the other apart from those words necessary when Dulcie’s computer wouldn’t bring up Microsoft Works or when the fax machine was being more than usually uncooperative. In the three years in which they had been so employed, there had never been any small talk between them but then neither of them had a store of small talk.
Henry, then thirty two, had still lived with his somewhat straight-laced parents and working in a knitting factory staffed almost entirely by women was, in a way, the ultimate purgatory for him but industrial knitting machines were his only trade and work elsewhere was becoming impossible to find. The massive growth of Chinese imports had seen to that and the mechanical setting up of the machines was swiftly giving way to electronic control.
Henry had been the obvious virgin and the women had guyed him mercilessly. No matter where Henry went in the factory, if the area supervisor was not present, the gossip among the machinists became deliberately salacious. Accounts of recent dirty weekends, imaginary, but in graphic detail. Women’s medical problems were dicussed in depth, in apparent disregard for Henry’s presence. Married women archly informed him that their husband would be away for the weekend. Whether or not it was true didn’t matter because they knew that Henry would be the last one to take up the implied invitation. Anything went if it fuelled Henry’s embarrassment. Success was Henry’s red face.
The silly thing was that in spite of the mob cruelty, they all liked Henry. He was helpful and obliging. It was just that he was fair game. Should they be having the slightest trouble with their machines, Henry would treat the problem seriously and take infinite pains to get them just right to his and their personal satisfaction. He was a fastidious trdesman and good at what he did. And in spite of all the ragging, small house-hold appliances could always be smuggled into his workshop to be repaired in his slack periods or while he ate his lunch.
It does not need to be stated that Henry was very much lacking in self-confidence and envied those who had this confidence and could handle social contacts with aplomb. Each morning after his shower, he would consider his physique, or rather the lack of it, in the bathroom mirror hoping to see even some slight gain in bulk. Henry was a sucker for the fitness-industry ads, their muscle building machinery, their dietary suppliments, and spent hours exercising in the privacy of his room. He could not face the exposure of his puny frame to what would surel be derisive public gaze in some gym. Perhaps at some future time when his hoped-for wash-board abs had developed. In this if in nothing else Henry was ever the optimist.
Henry was too young to have seen the old bully-kicking-sand-in-the-face Charles Atlas ads but it was, never-the-less, his firm conviction that muscles equalled confidence: muscles equalled popularity: muscles meant getting the girl. Yet, at the same time, he was just as convinced that no girl would ever marry him even with muscles. Which was ridiculous because someone would have given anything to marry him, Dulcie! Everyone else could see it.
“For heaven’s sake go and ask her out,” the girls were constantly telling him. But Henry could not believe that it could be possibly so. Dulcie was beautiful. She was so clever. So far above him. And what a cheek it would be for HIM to ask HER out. The girls were obviously just teasing, as usual, and he wouldn’t know how to ask her anyway. Henry put women, all women, on a pedestal. It was part of his upbringing and it worked against him.
Dulcie for her part was being encouraged to take the lead if Henry wouldn’t but that was not Dulcie. She hadn’t said a word to anyone, denied her interest vehemently, but everyone agreed that she was smitten: completely ga-ga. Secretly, she believed herself unattractive, hopelessly overweight. By the gaunt standards of the catwalk that was possibly true but Dulcie was no more than pleasantly plump and had the frame to carry it. In fact, most people wouldn’t consider her plump at all but Dulcie’s mirror presented her in elephantine proportions. While Henry had been frantically trying to put weight on, Dulcie had been trying just as hard to take it off. And with as little success. Requesting weight loss was a major part of her prayers.
The two were never to get together at Raymond’s. Asian knitwear spelled the end of that firm. The management cut staff for several years and were finally forced to shut the doors. Henry, clinging to his dying trade, crossed the Tasman to take up a position in Shepparton Victoria at the branch of a large Melbourne company. It was his first time away from home. The job lasted six months with the branch in turn falling prey to the Asians. It was then, through the influence of a cousin much longer on that side, that he obtained a position as the live-in manager of a commercial building in Bourke Street. The trams trundling back and forth interfered with his television but who could complain about that. He was right in the middle of everything.
With the closure of Raymond’s, Dulcie simply moved to another office position directly across the street and several years passed.
Dulcie’s new bathroom scales were purchased on a Saturday morning and first used on Sunday morning as soon as she had dried herself from her shower. The new scales were apparently way out. Briscoes could have them back. Her old scales, now discarded, had stubbornly insisted that she was 92 kilos give or take a kilo. For years, regardless of all the new diets, she had remained about 92 kilos. The new scales said 46 kilos which was ridiculous. She lifted her right foot tentatively before stepping off and, in that instant, the scales registered 23 kilos. What was going on? She stepped on again. The scales read 12 and a bit. Stepping off they registered about 6.
Common sense would suggest that she should have stopped at that stage. The bathroom mirror showed her as always, the whole 92 kilos worth, yet she definitely felt lighter and as bouncy as being on the moon. Her imagination surely. Something compelled her to try again. This time her weight was too low for an accurate indication and stepping off threw her against the bathroom wall.
Dressing in the bathroom proved impossible, how astronauts manage with the weightlessness of space and the confines of the space lab is difficult to imagine. There could be no doubt now that the scales were telling the truth no matter how strange it might be. Giant leaps in the open spaces of the moon are one thing but in the confines of a small flat fragile ornaments are at hazard.
Some of us, in Dulcie’s situation, would find this a welcome opportunity to get a few world records under our belt, the high jump, pole vault, that sort of thing, and make some money out of it but not Dulcie. Dulcie was ultra retiring. Her all-business front was there to ward off social contact which she found hard to handle. The idea of becoming famous, of being the whole world’s property, was anathema. Finding herself to be a freak the ultimate disaster. It was not something that she could tell her few close friends or even her family.
In the bedroom, she distributed the coins form her small-change jar about her various pockets and added two heavy glass dolphins. As a temporary expedient it helped a little but it was clear that moving without drawing attention to herself was going to take some serious practice. She sat and had a think.
On the Monday, she called in sick and visited a dive shop in the next block. Sha bought a dive belt and the proprietor, not unnaturally, queried her need to purchase more weights than the belt could actually hold. She could hardly tell him that she intended to wear the belt under her clothes and might perhaps wear a shoulder bag of weights when out walking. She could see the belt being very uncomfortable.
She wore tailored suits in her work which was fortunate. The belt could be concealed. The downside was that she must always keep her jacket buttoned regarrdless of the weather which was quickly noticed by her workmates. It was put down to the fact that she was putting on weight and feeling embarrassed about it.
Although Dulcie could never again bring herself to step onto any scales, her weight continued to drift down and even entered into the negative region. She found ways to manage and conceal this. She had prayed for weight reduction and received it with a vengeance.
It was a cheap air fare that had Dulcie walking down Bourke Street enjoying the afternoon sun and soaking in that special ambience that makes Melbourne uniquely itself. She was lightly dressed for the day was hot and wore her weighted shoulder bag diagonally. It was not a day for the dive belt. There was more then enough at ground level to take her attention and she did not see the man high above her struggling to free the pulley on a short flag staff that jutted from a building. A job that he would better have left for someone with the appropriate safety equipment. She was also too absorbed to notice a sullen youth coming up behind her. She was not aware of his presence until the strap of her obviously heavy bag was cut.
While the rest of us feel the heat radiating from a pavement, we are unlikely to be aware of the thermal air currents that result. For Dulcie they were disastrous. She began to rise from the pavement and, at her cries for help, those around her stared dumbly at her and at the misguided youth making off with her bag and at first no-one made a move to help. Which seems to be the norm in emergencies. People just freeze. By the time someone did make a move, Dulcie was already out of reach.
So it was that Dulcie going up met Henry coming down. They grabbed for each other and their combined fall was much less heavy than it would have been for Henry alone although it was still enough for Dulcie to twist her ankle and that both were badly shaken goes without saying.
“Please! Whatever you do. Don’t let go of me,” Dulcie whispered clinging to Henry as he helped her hobble into the building and into a lift away from the public gaze. But that was the last thing that Henry wanted to do.