Stefan is fat, balding, sweaty and wears glasses. Yes, he is an accountant. He works from home in a small neatly stacked office next to the laundry. Most days of the week he wears a shirt with no tie, tucked into carefully ironed pants. No shoes, but thick woolen socks to keep his feet from getting cold. He deals with numbers and spreadsheets and prefers to communicate with clients via email. Yes, in the forty five minutes he allows for lunch, he watches porn on the internet. But only after he has finished his chicken schnitzel roll and washed his hands thoroughly.
Stefan determines his own working hours. On fridays he prefers to go out to a long lunch. Well, more precisely, several short lunches back to back. He dons his usual office attire but this time wears shiny black shoes, a tweed suit jacket and a thin stripy tie. He carries with him a large leather briefcase. As he walks to the little Japanese restaurant on the corner, his belly fat bulges over his belt and his arse begins to sweat.
Every Friday he orders the same things. A platter of prawn gyoza, two miso soups, some californian rolls and a large serving of seaweed salad. He orders a Yebisu beer for lubrication. The small Japanese woman is always curt and puts him at ease with her polite formalities. As he pretends to read the menu, Stefan can’t help but notice the perky breasts beneath her apron.
There is rarely anyone else eating in the restaurant so in between visits to his table, the small Japanese waitress sits down on a stool in the kitchen and talks in Japanese to the chef. At one of these opportune moments, once all his food has been served, Stefan glances out the window to make sure no one is peering in and then he reaches down next to his chair, clicks open the large leather brief case, lifts it up onto his lap and swiftly and smoothly scrapes and pours the entire untouched content of the plates and bowls into the brief case. He pours the beer in, clips it shut again and lowers it to the ground. When the waitress reemerges she smiles politely and takes the empty plates away. The language barrier does not stop her from understanding just how much he enjoyed his meal. Stefan leaves a 15% tip and leaves abruptly.
Two blocks north on high street Stefan enters Mansini Italian restaurant. He orders gnocchi pesto, an anitpasti platter with extra stuffed mushrooms, an eggplant parmigiana and a long macchiato with three sugars. It’s well past the conventional lunch hour now so Mansini is always quiet as well. Perhaps only two or three other customers and a relatively inattentive waiter. At precisely the right time, Stefan slides the contents of the plates one by one into the brief case.
The third restaurant is a steakhouse. Stefan has not eaten a scrap of food all day so by this time his saliva glands are working on overdrive. He is impatient to be served his reef and beef, rump steak with mushrooms and gravy, side of fries and iced chocolate. Of course, when the frumpy fake blonde retires behind the bar to suck on her sarsaparilla, it all goes into the brief case.
By the time Stefan gets home, his underarms and belly are soggy with giant sweat patches. His enormous frame wobbles like jelly under the rythmic pounding of his accelerated walk. He closes and locks the front door behind him and undoes his tie. In the lounge he presses play on the cassette player and out pipes the sultry synthesizers of New Order, Power Corruption Lies. From out of the laundry cupboard he unrolls a giant blue tarp on the lounge room floor. Hastily he rips his shirt off, lets his pants down and flings his sweat soaked underpants across the room. Naked, he takes the briefcase, unlatches it and turns it upside down, releasing a slurry of warm meats, sloppy vegetable matter, milk, seaweed and coagulated sauces onto the blue tarp. As the beat builds to a crescendo, Stefan launches his heaving paunch onto the tarp and slides the length of the lounge room. He immerses himself in the food, lying on it, spreading it with flaps of his wings, pushing his face and ears into it. He rises to his knees and slips down onto his gut once more, grinding his swollen genitalia against slippery pieces of eggplant, gnocchi. Once the food matter is crushed and pounded and combined into a lather of unrecognisable slop, he takes it by the handful and rubs it over his chest and armpits, in his crack and through his hair and eyebrows. The tape rolls to an end and Stefan falls into a deep contented sleep.
Later on he rolls up the tarp, thoroughly washes his body and returns to his desk with a chicken schnitzel roll from the fridge.
