119 DAYS

JOJO looks slightly more glam with pearls and lipstick.

PRODUCER: Do you know how grateful you should be? We’re saving your son’s life. We’re making you stars. Do you know how many bloody TV Week and Woman’s Day interviews you can squeeze cash from?

JOJO: He is not getting this surgery.

PRODUCER: We gave you your pearls, your lipstick. What more do you want? A butler? A tap-dancing giraffe? What?

JOJO: Fourteen thousand deaths they reckon in America last year ’cause of this butcher bypass job. It’s a bloody genocide!

PRODUCER: You knew the facts before—

JOJO: Before’s before and now’s now!

PRODUCER: What’s changed?

Beat.

JOJO: You don’t give a shit about him, none of you do. You don’t even see him.

PRODUCER: You can’t miss seeing him—he’s as wide as a mile!

JOJO: I won’t let you hurt him, I won’t. So you just take your cameras and that meddling broomstick and stick your fairytales where the sun don’t shine.

PRODUCER: You want the gloves off? Alright, Joanne, they’re off. You are very, very small and we are very, very big. If you try and screw us, we will fuck you so hard you’ll feel our cock at the back of your tonsils. We’ll make Australia despise you, revile you. Right now you’re just colourful, pitiable freaks but you will be fucking loathed. Bricks through your windows, people spitting on you in the shops, a nation baying for the blood of the fat, useless and catastrophically stupid. After we’ve sued for breach of contract you and your boy will be lucky to call a wheelie bin home and a bit of used gum dinner. You get it? We will have our inspirational fat man reborn story. We always do.

JOJO is shocked, unable to say a word.

102 DAYS

ARTY: The new Arty?

PRODUCER: What’s his deal? Motivational spokesman, musician—ooh! TV chef. You could sell that. Former fat man gives you the Skinny on Diets that work—you know, you with a chef’s hat counselling fatties, looking through their fridge, them crying, you understanding—you see it?

ARTY: All I want is to be normal.

PRODUCER: Bullshit! All anyone wants is to be extraordinary.

ARTY: Better than normal?

PRODUCER: Now we’re cooking with gas! So paint us the future, a scenario, you know, you abseiling down Kilimanjaro or you with a gorgeous bird, tits the size of watermelons on a beach in Hawaii—something with… favour.

ARTY: I s’pose I got a couple ideas what the future may be like, maybe…

PRODUCER: You dirty dog! Gimme some sugar!

ARTY: In the life Arty’s living in his head

He owns a briefcase, old and cracked, which his wife thinks isn’t good enough for him

And it’s one of those arguments that they have

When he comes home from a hard day’s work and hangs his Fedora on the hook in the hall