Romance:From Fat To Fatale(26)

Larry digested the problem like a basic example of primary school mental arithmetic. The first step was to contact a small firm of shiny new lawyers that happened to share office space in the same building as the lady nutritionist. Miclav might be a festering perversion on the butt of our God-fearing society but he still had Constitutional rights that had to be upheld. Check. Sometimes you get really lucky and stumble across the right people at exactly the right time. I told you those addresses might come in useful, didn't I?

Yeah? I bet you weren't even listening. Well, I would never have thought of calling them but Larry was better connected to the town's business contacts than I ever would be so it was kind of a lucky break because those young, newly-qualified, greedy and ambitious lawyers in their low-budget, lizard-lair, offices had been on their knees every morning, praying for a break that would get them on the front page of the local newspapers and a side bar in the nationals, air-time on the radio and a chance to pronounce their well-rehearsed sound-bytes on the TV. Who or what they'd been praying to might be open to question; they were lawyers after all -

so you couldn't really imagine them being at the front of the line at St Peter's pearly gate, expecting preferential treatment for all their good works on earth - could you? Exactly.

They'd already sold their souls to the first - but not necessarily the highest -

bidder and now they were eagerly awaiting the pay-off. How strange that their first big break should come through my timely intervention on Miclav's grubby, sweaty-palmed behalf. The Lord, indeed, surely moved in mysterious ways. The lawyers were so excited at the prospect of handling Miclav's case that they didn't waste a single second before contacting every newspaper, radio and TV station in the area to announce their courageous decision to defend this poor, misguided young man whose rights had been trampled underfoot by a callous and uncaring state.

When I called back to confirm the fees for all this concentrated legal effort, an over-excited lady lawyer babbled that the firm would be more than happy to handle the case on a pro bono basis - just as long as I didn't bring any other law firms into the picture. This would be the case that would put them on the map. Screw the fees.

This was gold dust. And there was me, ready to trade in my humble savings account to spring my pervo-sibling from the slammer, and we'd just got legal counsel to work for free.

It's completely true that these guys were on a crusade. For justice?

Well, not really. More like a seasoned campaign of shameless self-promotion with Miclav in the background as an unpaid extra on their rapidly-developing publicity film set. The problem for the lawyers was that they moved too fast and nearly had him out of jail by the same afternoon. That was simply way too fast for the TV

companies to set up their cameras and arrange interviews with the newly-suited and freshly coiffured legal team. So they had to ask for a delay - in the name of justice, of course, - to make sure that the details hadn't been processed too quickly.

It was an unexpected opportunity for Miclav to lose some weight too. His first meal arrived in his solitary cell on a plastic tray with plastic cutlery and when he lifted the cover on his plastic plate he found a dead rat festooned across his congealing hash brownies and burger. Whether the offending article was an unsubtle message from the other inmates or an expression of the local police's contempt for Miclav's peculiar proclivities remained a mystery. All we knew was that Miclav had to resort to burning some of the vast numbers of calories that he'd stored as body fat since he was a babe in arms. From the size of the misguided ball of blubber, starvation was going to be a long, long way over the horizon.

The wheels of justice turned and the system considered the evidence, evaluated the festering miscreant of an accused and weighed up the chances of a successful prosecution. They were on very shaky and uncertain ground. Once the authorities had determined that the players in Miclav's favourite form of entertainment were indeed adults, some of the other confusing details could be cleared up as well. For a start, they were not Albanian dwarves. That was a disgusting slur and a cruel aspersion on Albanians everywhere and an apology was surely owed to the great and noble people of Albania.

No. They were Ukrainian dwarves and the great and noble people of the Ukraine deserved respect and recognition for producing these amazing yet diminutive actors. Small in stature they may have been but they more than compensated for their lack of height by showing an energy and enthusiasm for their chosen profession that was quite breathtaking. You wanted to applaud their efforts and their stamina. And their, well, virtuosity. The lawyers tried to drag out the case and squeeze every last droplet of publicity from the rapidly cooling scandal but Miclav was freed, his PC was quietly returned and the world turned its collective wrath to more suitable causes. Miclav even gained a sort of weird notoriety at school from his unfortunate, recent experiences in the arms of the local law enforcement community. He'd morphed overnight from being the disgustingly fat lard ass with the creepy personal habits to being a little bit of a bad boy. And impressionable gals in their teenage years just can't keep away from the bad boys, can they? No, they cannot. Like flies to molasses in the summertime, they started buzzing round Miclav, curious to discover how bad he really was. So he started to wear an old pair of Ray Bans indoors to add to the air of mystique that had gathered around his considerable girth. He even started to cinch his waist belt a little tighter to squeeze a couple of inches off his ballooning gut. Miclav had inadvertently discovered a new role for himself and he seemed destined to play it for all it was worth. When he perfected his sneer and borrowed a scoop of Mavenka's glutinous hair gel to slick back his greasy locks, the transformation was complete.