NZBC summer fiction: THE MANLY

Who was it who said slovenliness kills love? Pete and Julie had been married eight years and no one had announced this station was the end of the line.

They must have still loved one another because Julie wouldn’t have stuck around if she’d felt it was hopeless. But each took the other for granted: Julie never wore makeup, and Pete’s spare tyre, which might once have served a kid’s tricycle, would now be a better fit for a Mini. His workmates called him “Podgy Pete”.

Pete shook his head when he saw his own reflection and grumbled about not being able to fit into his trousers any more. Julie suggested he buy a pair with an elasticised waistband, but mostly just told him, “I like a cuddly man. I don’t want you going all skinny on me.” She thought Pete was taking fat far too seriously.

One weekend, while she was redecorating the dining room and Pete was polishing off bacon and eggs with fried bread, he said, “If I could turn back time I’d buy shares in a button factory, I’ve bust so many of them.”

“You could skip lunch,” Julie suggested playfully, but she swore she saw a tear in his eye.

She put down her paintbrush and picked up one of the yellowed sheets of newspaper that had been spread out under the now rolled-up carpet.

“Perhaps you could turn back time with one of these,” she said.

“What?”

“‘Inches off your waist instantly. Full depth. Silken finish’.”

“What are you on about, woman? This is a crisis.”

“‘The MANLY’,” she said, reading from the old newspaper. “It’ll ‘pull in your waist two to five inches’. It looks like a corset, only more… well, medical.”

“Here, give me that,” said Pete. He read the coupon aloud as he filled it in with his ballpoint pen. “‘Smartens looks and slims!’ ‘Please send me my MANLY by return. I will pay the postman thirty-five shillings plus postage’. Shillings! There… Now, this better work, or it’s the knacker’s yard for me.” He guessed at his waist measurement and pushed the newspaper aside.

“They call them ‘love handles’ for a reason,” said Julie, “and I love you as you are.” But she played along and, as Pete watched, she clipped out the coupon with the kitchen scissors, put it in an envelope, stuck on a stamp and wrote down the address.

It didn’t seem strange when somehow this coupon from a thirty-five-year-old newspaper made its way to the post office. But when, two weeks later, she answered the door to a postman bearing a brown paper parcel and wanting to know what a shilling was, Julie couldn’t contain herself.

Turning back time ended up solving a number of problems in the present. The MANLY was the talk of the office, Pete’s work colleagues gathered around to watch him demonstrate “the famous MANLY ‘Locked Hands’ principle”, and thanks to the exclusive frontal waist-trimmer, no one ever called him Podgy Pete again.