‘You need to go on a diet for my funeral.’

I stare, mouth full, now half open, food slopping out, at my stretched skeined father lecturing me.

‘I don’t want a fat daughter at my coffin. Everyone staring. Thinking the worst. Wondering how did it come to this. Why did she let herself go. She used to be a lovely girl. A beautiful girl. I can see them now, and I’ll not have it. I want the best of everything when the lord takes me. You’ll not ruin it like you do everything else.’

‘You’ve got about a year, give or take a few months.’ He takes a long sip of tea and challenges me with his slurping. I’m speechless. I gulp back my mouthful and tears form in my eyes from the effort of swallowing.

‘Are you dying?’, I offer meekly, throat almost clear.

‘In about a year, can you not hear. Get up! Get up!’ He springs up onto his pin feet like a modern rumpelstiltskin turning in circles like a geriatric cat.

‘What have you got?’, I’m still seated, bewildered, unmoved.

He stops turning.

‘One of those cancers or something.’

Evidently there isn’t time to waste and he shuffles through the weeks hoarded papers on the table, and finding his required reading spreads out a bruised Super Saver brochure with this weeks special buys highlighted in garish type. He jabs a dirty finger insistently at the sleek blonde women in lycra with dumb bells. Women made for exercise porn, or just porn, with smiley faces. There are fairy tale castles behind them, and equally effervescent male models who fake run alongside them to their imaginary home full of discounted German supermarket produce. They have power drills, and solar lights and make love on diy benches. A stout caricature German shopkeeper stands behind them whipping the poor confused models while they contort all over different useless gadgets from aisle 3.

His snapping fingers in my face bring me back from my schadenfreude.

‘It’s not very Christian. I mean did the priest say I have to lose weight?’

I think of the priest, he glows with more than the holy spirit. All the old ladies coo around him worshipping his deity. He could do fake running, I’m sure of it. I saw him once swimming in the hidden pool with the waterfall high in the forest at Ard Dara. He stripped off all his clothes and dived in. I believed in god ever since. I watched him in all his pleasure and then stole his dog collar. His is a full white band, in the old style. It fits around his whole neck but I wear it now on my arm. I didn’t wait to watch him look for it. I like its hard biting feel on my skin, it leaves red welts that last for days. Sometimes blood. It is the only thing that stops me eating myself.

‘Christian? Christian? I’m saving your life girl, I’m lowering your blood pressure. I’m adding years to your very existence. Cholesterol, liver, brain function. I’m not dying till you sort your self out. I talked to Marie in Hanlons Chemist and she told me that the slimming world women are a very helpful group, supportive’, he pauses for full effect, ‘nice.’

‘They are on the facebook.’ He finishes hopping from one leg to the next.

I blink. 

-

I stand at his grave. The priest comforts me, I press my face into his new clerical collar. I am so much lighter.