Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online Page B

woman’s perennial ulcer, or:
    ‘There you go, love,’ as she set a plate of food in front of a shuddering old crone, or:
    ‘Have you given some thought to what I told you last week about smoking, Mr Sangster?’
    She could be motherly when required, or sisterly, or like a devoted daughter. She never failed to get what she wanted, which was the best for her patients.
    Her colleagues pronounced her a marvel.
    ‘Eleanor’s a marvel,’ they said.
    At morning tea back at the Community Health Centre there was congenial chat among the nurses. Each nurse discussed her patients’ worsening problems around a large laminex table.
    ‘Mr Simek is forgetting to go to the toilet and he can’t seem to manage the phone anymore. Becoming very uncooperative too – a real pain!. I think he’ll have to be moved out of home pretty soon.’
    ‘Poor old soul. He was a lovely dignified man only a few years ago.’ This was Miss Thinne talking, of course.
    ‘Yes, I suppose he was … It seems so long ago now, I’d sort of forgotten. You remember them all so well!’
    ‘Eleanor’s a marvel where that’s concerned.’
    Miss Thinne blushed, not out of modesty but almost out of shame for being so ideally suited to her chosen profession, as well as so ideally suited to her chosen home life and the companion who went with it: so ideally suited, in other words, to life altogether.
    Late in the afternoon she would leave the Health Centre and, if she didn’t see the car waiting by the side of the road with Miss Fatt reading a magazine against the steering wheel, she would stroll to the bus stop.

A Typical Miss Fatt Day
    Miss Fatt worked for a glamour agency, which meant she was a model most days, and more occasionally an actress. Being busty, she didn’t get much fashion work, but there were plenty of other assignments.
    On television, she’d played a criminal’s girlfriend (or possibly wife) in an episode of a popular detective series, a good meaty part which had required her to convey Anxiety, Love, Bitterness, and finally Grief and Horror when her boyfriend (or possibly husband) went down in a hail of police bullets.
    Her one movie role so far had required rather less acting than that, but at least she hadn’t bared her breasts, unless you were going to split hairs over where exactly breasts began.
    Mostly, however, she did commercials, through the agency of Carp & Bravitt. Starring and supporting roles came in mixed succession: one day she might be almost lost in a crowd of women gaping at a man because he was wearing a particular brand of shirt; the next day she might be the star, holding a can of floor polish with a smile. Next time after that, however, she might again be running in a crowd, following a seven-foot rabbit to a supermarket.
    Obviously there wasn’t much of a future in commercials, but Miss Fatt had high hopes for her acting career: in a few weeks, she would be playing another, different girlfriend (or possibly wife) of a criminal in another, different television drama, and in about two months she was actually contracted to play a sinister, sexy villainess in Lethal Weapon VI , a big-budget international movie. This was certainly a big deal, in any sense of the word.
    ‘Heard about your film job coming up, Suzie,’ said Mr Carp.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Mr Bravitt. ‘A real stroke of luck. But you deserve it, Suzie.’
    Both men thought she had excellent legs and breasts.
    The makers of TV commercials were always very nice to her, too, because it was against their interests to have anyone miserable associated with the product. For Miss Fatt, a commercial meant nothing less than an afternoon of fun. Directors would ask her how she was going, did she want a cup of tea, would she mind awfully doing just one more retake?
    ‘All right girls: big leap in the air now … Come on! I know it’s daft, but let’s all think happy thoughts about getting paid for this!’
    In all her years in TV commercials, even as the lowliest