The three of us were sitting in McDonald’s. Me and Philip were eating, Ramona wasn’t. Philip had a couple of big macs, and two large meals to go with them.

Philip’s one of these people who is always hungry, which is one of the reasons we always come to McDonald’s these days, because he can fill his face without spending much more than a tenner. He has a really annoying thing of eating shitloads but never putting on any weight. I just had a regular cheeseburger with a diet coke and small chips, because I do put on weight, and I cannot diet to save myself. Ramona is always hungry too, but McDonald’s don’t serve her kind of food.

We were talking about what we were going to do this weekend, with no enthusiasm. We all knew nothing would be decided until Friday night at earliest.

“Look who’s here,” said Ramona, who had been staring out the window since we arrived. I checked the face outside and found Chel, standing there, staring at the menu. She can’t read, and she never comes in. She’s sort of an ex, but it was never serious. A Brazilian, tall, great body long flowing locks and so forth. I still think about her, but she’s got the wrong look these days. Feminists and lesbians can bitch all they like about body fascism and bulimia, but the erogenous zone shifts, shit happens and today’s models are hotter than ever. Chel. Chel looked like a goddess and dressed like a tramp. I guessed she must have found a sugar daddy or be working the nightshift (being a ho to those of you with deficient imaginations) because it looked like she’d been eating. She’d come across here when her tree was cut down, and unlike most of the nymphs she had no guts for suicide. She just had an empty look, like she was in a permanent state of depression that an elephant’s dose of happy pills couldn’t cure. And now she’d noticed us and was looking at us with those glass eyes that made you feel guilty for not being suicidally depressed too.

“Who?” Then. “Fucking her,” said Philip. “Why’s she staring at us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s hungry.”

“Well why did she come here?” Asked Ramona.

“She’s putting me off my food with that bloody staring. One of you… get her to come in.”

“Not me. I’m just going to order a burger,” said Ramona.

Ramona never ate burgers, but that left me, so I went out to get Chel. She just followed me with her eyes as I walked to the door and into the light rain. Chel stank of something like earth, or wet wood.

“Hey. How are you doing?”

She just shrugged, and looked at me in a kind of unfocused way.

“Do you need glasses?” I asked, grinning so she knew it was a joke. She glanced over to Philip at our table. Next time I decided to sit upstairs so if she came by she wouldn’t see us. That’s where we usually sit, because the bottom is generally packed with skiving kids and single mums.

“We were wondering if you wanted to come in?

She looked at me, properly this time, and said “Okay”, quietly, and followed me inside. There was a seat free beside Philip, and she sat there. He said something that could have been “Hi”. Chel nodded, and I went back to my chips, dipping them in a pool of clotted ketchup on my napkin. She had her shoulders hunched, her head down, and looked like she was ready to hyperventilate at any moment.

Philip and I exchanged glances. I was trying to decide whether to make the effort of talking to her when Ramona got back.

“No burger?” Asked Philip.

“It’s on its way.” I got up for her to climb back to her seat, and she slumped against the window.

“You eating, Chel?” She asked, looking at the Forest Spirit opposite her. “You’re looking a bit anorexic.”

Chel murmured an answer to the effect that she was eating, but Ramona no longer cared. A blank-faced youth in a McDonald’s uniform placed a small, greasy package in front of her, and she grinned a thanks with her too-many teeth. Ramona liked to think she had an effect on guys. She unwrapped her package to reveal a shriveled Tutenkhamun of a burger that bore little resemblance to the picture at the counter. She lifted one of its sesame-seed pitted lips and looked inside.

“They’re easier to eat if you don’t look,” said Philip, who had a great deal of experience.

“Gherkins.” Said Ramona.

The uniformed boy returned, apologised, promised to bring back one without gherkins.

“So what are you doing just now, Chel?” Asked Ramona.

Chel didn’t answer for a while, then said, “I work in a supermarket.”

Ramona grinned at this, but was no longer looking at Chel. Her eyes were fixed on the doors to the toilets, and on the people going in and out, dumping their digested burgers and cokes in toilet bowls and coming back for more.

“We’re planning to go see ‘Awareness of Vacuity’ this Saturday. Fancy coming, Chel?” I said.

“We says who?” Cut in Ramona. “They sound like pretentious idiots and neither of us have heard of them.”

“Exactly. Something new. They’re the new Vines. My new favourite band.”

“Why can’t we just go see ‘The Strokes’?” Asked Philip. “You used to like them.”

“Yeah, but everyone listens to them now.”

“So?”

“If I listened to the same shit as everyone else, I’d be the same as everyone else.”

“I don’t think I should come, anyway,” said Chel, carefully.

Ramona’s burger returned. The boy waited by her this time as she checked it.

“Lettuce,” she said, barely taking her eyes off the loo door. The boy took it back.

“How do you know which one is the men and women’s?” Asked Chel, startling Ramona.

“The woman wears a skirt and keeps her leg together,” said Philip. He pushed his fingers through his hair, and some of it came out. His burger was finished, and he was staring to look thin.

“Oh,” said Chel, who lived in an androgynous world where men and women were still defined by genitalia.

This time, when the burger returned, all Ramona had to say was “cheese”.

“You bought that Popstar’s shite at Christmas,” said Philip. “So don’t give me that crap about your esoteric music tastes.”

“That was just irony,” I replied. “Some of us could do with more irony.”

Chel didn’t seem to notice my remark, but I still felt a general sense of guilt for saying it.

“Philip, you want me to get you and Chel a burger?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Which one?”

“The biggest one they have.”

I went to the counter. There wasn’t really a queue. I was disappointed by the counter girl’s lack of enthusiasm, but gods know it’s not a job I’d like. I got a quarter pounder meal for Philip and a cheeseburger with mineral water for Chel. The water was fucking expensive, but it felt like I’d bought a lot of karma. As I went back to our table, I passed the manager, bearing his offering back from Ramona’s rejection. Philip took his burger without a word and set to work on it like a logging engine. Chel just stared at hers with an expression of vague terror.

“There’s water,” I pointed out. I had meant what I said about irony, I now realised. Her stubborn honesty made me uncomfortable. “You like that.”

She looked at it, but could not bring herself to touch the plastic bottle.

“Don’t be so wasteful,” said Ramona. “There are children starving in… Africa, I imagine.”

Chel nodded, like she was a dog who’d just been told to sit. She walked over to the table, and returned with a plastic knife. I didn’t think I’d seen anyone actually use one before. I suppose they could just about cut through polystyrene, but not much else.

The manager brought Ramona her burger, and Chel unwrapped hers.

“Are you people stupid? I said gherkins, tomatoes, lettuce but no big Mac sauce. That stuff gives me the runs.”

Ramona resumed her grin, leering over Chel like a midwife while she prepared to cut the burger-child into bite-size pieces.

“I need the toilet,” she said suddenly, and left.

“Do you think she’s bulimic?” Asked Ramona.

“I never know what to say around her. She’s so hard to talk to,” I said.

“No social skills,” agreed Philip.

“The Golden Arches,” said Ramona slowly, so as not to dislodge the oracular spirit which was upon her. “Are the crucifix for the new age. No unnecessary suffering, unfounded belief or delayed gratification. Ronald McDonald is the supreme being, an immaculate god for a dirty world, turning nasty, confusing chaos into pre-packaged, standardised perfection. Because if something is really perfect, then, let’s face it, there is no need for alternatives. The only thing wrong with McDonald’s is the people. People get the tables dirty, and hock on burgers. Without people McDonald’s is perfect.”

“McDonald’s isn’t perfect,” said Philip. He’d finished the burger, and was starting to get famished and cranky again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just a zeitgeist.”

Ramona’s grin had reached its fullest extent. It could only mean one thing. A woman in early middle age was making her way to the toilets. It was winter, so she was well wrapped up, but you could see she had a really fat ass. Her legs supported her, like ripe pears or avocados, swollen with sweet juices, curved and soft. Her arms were like elongated udders, milky pale and filled with buttery fat. She walked with a graceful step, like a goddess of the ancient Germans, on her way to her pearly throne.

“A third of America is obese,” I volunteered.

“We should go there,” said Ramona. She stood up, and followed the woman into the toilet.

Her burger, like a hyperactive boomerang, was back again. I told the manager that she didn’t really want it. He was pissed off at first, but Philip took it. There was a silence as he held it close like his last son, and head down, finished it in four bites.

Ramona came back, looking very pleased with herself.

“Chel finally did it. Cut her wrists. Sap everywhere in there,” she said, cheerfully.

I felt something inside me, a sort of pain that I didn’t like, writhing around in my belly.

“What do you want to do Friday?” I asked, out of reflex.

“You know we’ll just come here,” said Ramona.

Philip looked out the window into the gardens. His shaking fingers were already fishing in his wallet for his next burger.

“How can you do it?” He asked Ramona. “Eat people.”

I wondered if he was asking because he was considering it as a supplement to his diet. It would probably be difficult for a novice. Ramona had been doing it for a long time.

“’How can I do it’?” She repeated. She put on a pair of sunglasses, and it looked like there were two deep holes in her head where her eyes should be, as empty as her smile. “Look at them, chewing and chewing without tasting, just fattening themselves for the day they die. They’re like cows.”

We did go back on Friday. And Saturday, and Sunday.