'TINA KEEBLE (THE BIG FAT WEEBLE)' — a short story

If you're going to become really fat, it won't help if your name is Keeble. Keeble rhymes with Weeble and this was an unfortunate coincidence for one Tina Keeble. A Weeble was a roly-poly egg-shaped toy produced by Hasbro Playskool bearing human characteristics. There was a Policeman Weeble and Farmer Weeble and so on.

      At Leighton Buzzard Middle School boys would taunt each other by saying, 'You fancy Tina Keeble the big fat Weeble' or 'Last one to the swings loves Tina Keeble the big fat Weeble.' Girls would comfort themselves after had put on a few pounds by saying, 'At least I'm not as big as Tina Keeble the Weeble' and so she became the benchmark. This was cruel, but children can be brutal. No more so than those of a small Bedfordshire town.

      It was not that Tina Keeble was not big boned or still holding puppy fat, nor was she suffering from any condition. She was just huge. Her face looked like two pink saddlebags with a face squeezed into the inch in the middle. She moved like a despondent yeti and puffed and panted at the most minuscule of exertion. She would destroy plates of food between taking deep breaths. She was constantly chewing sweets and seemed to have a permanent full sugar can of soft drink attached to her face. She would dispatch a packet of chocolate biscuits like a ravenous piranha. She had constant beads of sweat on her squidgy forehead and a belly that preceded her round corners. The younger kids would shout, 'Keeble wobbles but she don't fall down' (the song from the advert) as she walked past, but she never seemed to care. It was as if she was listening to voices in her own head or was in a trance. She paid no attention as if she were denoted for some higher calling.

      Tina Keeble was born at Stoke Mandeville hospital, Aylesbury. It had been a difficult delivery. The nurses said she had fought tooth and nail not to leave the womb. Her mother was Anglo-Irish and her dad was from Kettering and half-Indian. Her parents had met working in the Gossard bra factory in Leighton Buzzard. He worked as a warehouse foreman and she worked on the sewing machines. Like Tina, she was plain and had always struggled with her weight. He on the other hand was shy and rather gangly looking. So, when they found themselves kissing at a Christmas party after a drinking game they were pleased to have found each other. They shared a love of cigarettes and game-shows: this had been enough to strike up conversation. They would sit quietly down at the Working Men's Club holding hands under the table as the more vocal of their work crowd would banter about events of the day or poke fun at the management. Neither of them had encountered much affection for different reasons, and this small act of tenderness felt gentle and compassionate compared to the harshness of their different upbringings.

      Their wedding was a surgical affair at the registry office in town on a cold February day. The Reception at the Working Men's Club was well attended by work colleagues most of whom were surprised that the two had eloped so suddenly. The buffet had chicken tikka bites and profiteroles which most said was dead fancy.

      Many of the guests secretly laughed at the awkwardness of the couple, but it was generally considered sweet they had found each other. They had both been on the council list for a house for years when Mrs Keeble became pregnant. That helped them get two-bed roomed maisonette in one of the blocks off the Heath Road, near to Leighton town centre. They furnished it with presents from the wedding and some items from a catalogue that they paid off weekly. Tina was born in the spring of that year which cemented the relationship, a dark baby with a clump of dark hair and underweight. Mrs Keeble named his after her aunt who had passed away six months before. She imagined she would grow up to be dark, skinny and with black hair like her father and hoped she would not inherit her pasty Celtic genes.

      A year later the Gossard Bra factory closed, and the entire workforce had to queue at the Job Centre to fill out benefit forms. With such a glut of local people out of work, finding new work was difficult. Eventually Mr Keeble found a job as a picker and packer for a small plastics firm on the industrial estate. Mrs Keeble got a part-time job at the local Woolworths that had was on the high street. These jobs were both quite solitary: Mr Keeble worked alone in the small warehouse and only saw his supervisor twice a day while Mrs Keeble worked on a till in Woolworths and was discouraged from chatting during work time by the line manager Mr Khan. This being the case, the couple no longer had the social-life or the mutual friends they had before. They could no longer share jokes about the managers or talk about who was going where on holiday that year, and so the maisonette became very quiet in the evening but for the sound of the television and the odd siren going past. It was in this atmosphere of semi-silence that Tina was raised. As an only child she became solitary and preferred to play alone. She would often go down to the nearby river to with her mum or grandmother and sit, somehow mesmerized by the water. As she got older she would go alone to the riverside with toy plates and cups and have tea parties with imaginary friends. If her mother or anyone approached she would go silent as if only she could play the game. She did not grow up to be dark and gaunt like her father. She grew to be very fair-skinned like her mother and struggled terribly with her weight. By the time she was twelve years old she was already thirteen stone and seemed to put on another stone for every year that passed.

      Her mother seemed to equate care with sweet foodstuffs and bought sweets, cakes and biscuits to fill the absence of affection in the household. Tina grew huge on sugary indulgence until she had to order clothes from a specialist catalogue, which her mum paid off every week. She became introvert to the extreme and would only venture out of the house for school or the occasional shopping trip. She rarely conversed with her parents and would only ever speak if pushed on an issue outside of the house. Tina never liked school and would sit and doodle all day. She went under the radar of the more hardcore bullies as she was so silent. Her sheer size kept away any child who wanted to make a name for themselves by bashing up a weird kid. One day some of the more fashion conscience pretty girls decided to have some sport by trying to push her in puddle on the way home from school. She turned around unusually swiftly, looked straight into their eyes and smiled. Something entrancing glinted in her eyes and she would not move an inch or try and run away. The girls were all spooked into silence.

      'Leave me alone,' she said quietly with an impish grin, and they complied without knowing why.

      Tina would stay in class with her felt tip pens and paper and doodle away while humming. The subject of her drawings was always the same: fairies. She took any book from the school library with pictures of fairies and copied them with tracing paper and then coloured them in. No-one really knew where this fascination came from, least of all her mother who thought she may have left her in front of the TV for too long as a toddler.

      Tina was however very fond of her grandmother on her mother's side. Her grandmother, a strange and dour Welsh woman with a face like an animated gargoyle and straight white hair to her waist, would roll her eyes and tell Tina that there were no more fairies. She would insist that the Romans had chased all the fairies and the magic from these islands along with the druids. Tina's grandmother had grown up on a farm in Mid Wales and was schooled in superstitions that were mainly, and for good reason, forgotten. She would cross herself and say, 'Devil I defy thee' at the sight of a lone magpie and reprimand anyone found guilty of leaving an umbrella open inside of the house. When Tina was a child, her grandmother would regale her with folk tales from Wales, most of which had no meaning or satisfactory conclusion. Many of them seemed to be guided by her own pet hates and memory loss, this aside, Tina loved them. Tina would beg her grandmother to tell her the one about 'the ogre' or the 'the sea spirit' but the tale would change each time. Tina's father, who had no time for such faux Celtic fables would shout up the stairs, 'Stop filling my daughters head with your bloody Welshy nonsense.'

      Tina's bedroom was a shrine to fairies. She had dolls, posters, figurines, cushions and all manner of pixie-shaped or emblazoned goods that she collected mainly from the charity shops in the town. It was to this elfin den that she would return every night with some chocolate bars and a cake. She would arrange the dolls in a circle with a plate each. Each doll had a plate and a favourite sweet. She would light joss-sticks and candles that would shimmer and glimmer on the glitter on her pictures she had created and stuck on the wall. 

      She would whisper, 'Haribo gold bears are got for Orlagh, Parma Violets are got for Eoland, Rosebuds are got for Rhoswen and[A1]  got for Shaylee... Crunchie bar.'

      Her mother would hear her talking in this odd baby language to her dolls well into her teens. This worried her, but she didn't really know what to do about it. Her mother thought it better she did this than run wild on the streets like other children. She told herself it was just a phase Tina was going through.

      Tina left school with no qualifications. During her exams she just sat smiling at the examination supervisor with her unnerving grin that seemed to defy the apparent seriousness of the assessment. For a few months she sat in her room or sat by the riverbank and did nothing but colouring pictures, or she would sit in the front room watching videos with headphones on. The films were, naturally, all about fairies or they were fantasy based. She would watch titles like Willow or Dark Crystal repeatedly back-to-back. Her father became annoyed at what he thought was her failure to engage with reality. He also needed her to contribute financially. He got peeved at giving her pocket money when she was of working age. He became angry about this and confronted her saying that she should try and do something with herself and get in the 'real world'. These lectures became a regular occurrence. He blamed his wife for pandering to her too much and used his daughter as a stick to beat his wife as the marriage was beginning to lose its veneer.

      Mrs Keeble managed to get Tina a job at the Woolworths that she worked in, mainly to appease her irritable husband. She filled out the application form with Tina who showed little interest. Tina, at first very reticent at the idea, started part-time finding it not as bad as she thought. The line manager, Mr Khan, liked her as she didn't chatter and was compliant in a docile kind of way. Tina preferred to be in the storeroom or stacking shelves. She would work away methodically while humming to herself. When she did go on the tills, her shyness would mean that most transactions were done in silence. The occasional kid from her old school would shout out an insult as they departed the shop. The kids would usually be being shooed out Mr Khan for trying to steal from the pick-and-mix. Mr Khan, who had developed a soft spot for Tina, would tell Tina to 'ignore the little brats' and Tina would just smile seemingly unfazed by the situation. After a month he took her on full-time and even gave her overtime when it arose. Mr Khan had suffered too many Bedfordshire girls with their short tempers and foul language.

      Tina liked the job. If she did as Mr Khan said, she got left alone. It also meant that her dad could no longer lecture her. She would spend her lunch hours by the riverside or trawling the charity shops for fairy paraphernalia. At the end of the day she would always fill a bag at the pick-and mix sweet counter with all her favourite sweets, which paid for with her staff discount. The other girls who worked there thought she was snotty or just plain weird, but they never said much as most of them got on well with her mum. After work Tina would disappear out and not come home until her dad had gone to the Working Men's club for a pint. Sometimes she was later than that. Her mother hoped that she had found a boyfriend. She had found her work trousers in the wash basket and noted that there were green grass stains on the knees. She wondered if this was evidence of sexual activity. On one hand she worried about pregnancy, but on the other she was glad that Tina might have found a boyfriend. She spoke to her husband about this, asking him to perhaps talk to her about 'the birds and the bees'. Mr Keeble, who'd had a skinful of Guinness up at the Working Men's club, just laughed it off:

      'If that girl gets up the duff she'll go straight to the top of the council housing list and have her own flat in weeks. All the stupid girls a doing this round here. She'll be out of our hair with a place of her own to live in her pretend funny little world. And what's more, our food bills will go down every month.'

      Mrs Keeble, stunned into silence by her husband's seeming utilitarian reaction, went and sat in the kitchen alone wishing in a way, that she could get 'up the duff' and move into a new flat. That night she tried to talk to Tina asking if she was 'seeing anyone special'?

      Tina hid behind her fringe mortified with embarrassment then said, 'Yeah mum, but you won't understand.'

      Mrs Keeble grinned at her peculiar child and sighed with worry and relief. A host of thoughts entered her head, but she was happy that her daughter may have a life outside of Woolworths and fairy pictures. She put her hand on her shoulder and said in a gentle caring voice, 'You just make sure you are careful and don't get hurt Tina.'

      One evening in spring, Tina filled a bag at the pick-and-mix counter as a few of her work colleagues who were watching giggled to each other. Her pudgy face showed one of its very few variations as she half smiled. Her little squinty eyes seemed to brighten at the prospect of the sugary treats that she crammed into the paper bag. She filled three bags and stuffed them into her rucksack which was emblazoned with the obligatory imps. She then shuffled out of the shop breathing heavily as she went. She walked up the high street but stopped by the off license on North Street to adjust the straps on her rucksack. She saw down on the floor a lighter which she very slowly picked up. It had I love Hawaii written on it with a picture of a hula girl. Its cheery opulence made her smile. She continued out of the town centre. She followed the canal path out of town north and headed towards a path that lead to the woods.

      She arrived at the huge iron gates at the start of the Stockgrove woods. She followed the path into the pines and beech trees until she could no longer hear the cars. In the early evening there was still the odd couple walking their dog and an occasional jogger. But the deeper into the woods she went, the less likely she was to encounter anyone. Though it was spring it was already getting dark as she reached the Black pool or the Charcoal pool as some called it. This was a small drainage pond around fifteen meters by fifteen around at the edge of the wood. The Forestry Commission had put a small single seated bench by the side of it which had been carved out of wood in the shape of an acorn.

      Though it was wet, Tina parked her rear end on it, barely fitting in its dimensions.

      She then waited till the half-light would mean nobody would be in the woods. The two ducks, a drake and a hen, that sometimes inhabited the pool seemed disturbed and took flight across the open fields, quite possibly to join the safety of the larger flock down on the canal. A grey squirrel, sensing the day was done, took his beech nut up into the trees and disappeared into the branches. The last of the lazy sun shone against the silver birch. The fields that were beside the wood began to darken as the sun finally let go and night filled the void. 

      Tina sat in the darkness with her eyes closed. The only noise was the mild wind in the branches, the odd creak of tree limbs and the far away muted rumble of a jumbo jet a few miles away. She took out the lighter she had found and eventually sparked it up to see what she was doing, then gathered the bags with the various sweets and laid them out along the shallowest bank of the pool opposite the reeds. She created small piles of different combinations of sweets.

      There was a seeming predefined method to this activity. Tina was uncharacteristically motivated by this. She took meticulous care over the pattern and measure in this spread. all the while she made a guttural sound from the effort. Once satisfied she put the empty rucksack on the bank and then stripped naked in the dwindling light. Tina then awkwardly stepped into the pool, her pale flesh, luminous through lack of sun, juddered to unsteady stop.

      She lit the lighter and held it out toward the end of the pool where a group of rushes grew. She then began to mouth an obsolete half hymn from a happier epoch. This odd psalm suddenly came to a crescendo and then ended abruptly. There was silence for a few seconds, apart from the distant sound of the London train miles away and Tina's breathing. A small orange flicker like a mute baby firework appeared in the rushes. This was followed by another but in pink and then another in orange. Then in the silver birch opposite what looked like a glittering mosquito zipped between two trees. Then it began...

      The police found a muddy pink rucksack next to some folded clothes but no trace of a body. But even though they dredged the pool, there was no sign of Tina. They thought she may have met someone and run away as her mother was convinced she had been seeing someone. They put up missing posters, but nothing came of it. A social worker visited the Keebles and asked a lot of questions, the tone of which got Mr Keeble very angry. After a small inquiry and no evidence of any mistreatment by the couple, the case was dropped. In the end they just had to leave the inquiry open as the chief inspector in charge had more pressing cases than a girl who had quite probably just run away.

      Mr Keeble blamed his wife for having let her get so heavy by feeding her the wrong food. Mrs Keeble blamed her husband for driving her away with his bad temper. Either way the marriage, it seemed, could not stand the loss of their daughter as it was possibly the only reason they had stayed together. There was no funeral or closure for the couple and they became strangers to each other. Tina's grandmother became terribly upset about her missing granddaughter, yet she stayed very quiet about the matter. She felt that she should have done more and perhaps not indulged her fairy fascination. She would often be seen in the woods looking terribly lost as she slowly traversed the smaller paths through the heavy bracken. They found a picture of Tina as a baby in the locket she kept round her neck when she died that Christmas. Mr Keeble would stay in the working men's club until closing time then sleep on the sofa snoring like a walrus.

      At Woolworths, Mr Khan would often lament the loss of his best worker and would hold her up as a shining example of a diligent industrious employee to the bubblegum-chewing wastrels he was forced to employ. In the pubs on the high street, all those that mocked her, now gossiped and speculated as to the nature of her disappearance. Some said that she had faked her own suicide and eloped with a gypsy, others said she was still in the pond. Ghost stories and sightings abounded till the next town scandal buried Tina's disappearance. Her only real lasting legacy was that young heartless boys would still shout: 'Last one to the park loves Tina Keeble the big fat Weeble!' then race each other energetically to the park.

      Mrs Keeble joined Weight Watchers and lost seven stone. While at Weight Watchers she met a guy called Morris who worked for a gas company and drove a Honda Civic. Morris had also lost four stone so they had a lot in common. One warm night she tiptoed past her drunk sleeping husband and into Morris's Honda Civic to begin a new life. Mr Keeble saw this as a relief and it meant less nagging over his drinking habits. He stayed in the maisonette for a while and kept Tina's room the same, not as a shrine but just out of laziness. He found a job as a forklift driver in Wolverton and got a council transfer to be closer to his family. A young couple, who didn't have children, moved into the maisonette. They took down all the pictures of fairies and painted over the stencils on the walls in magnolia to make a computer room.

      But as the townsfolk of Leighton Buzzard all hurried back to their homes after days at work or long commutes. As the high street pubs emptied to the sound of empty threats and foolish promises. As the sodium orange of the lamplight flickered into action to shine down upon graffitied walls. As the shops, warehouses and factory lights went down leaving only the garish light of the 24-hour garage and its solitary operative. As televisions on autotimers finally gave way to the impending night. At the Charcoal pool there was only the sound of the wind over the bracken and the creaking of the bending birch. Then, in voices quieter than a bird's breath, minuscule voices hailed the name of their newfound queen as they chanted in a language not heard on these islands for millennia: Tina Keeble Tina Keble Tina Kable Tin Kable Tin Kabele Tin Kabelle Tin kabelle Tin-kabelle Tinka...

 [A1]Should this 'ac' be 'and'? Clarified in next sentence that this is 'odd baby language', but just to check.