It’d been a membership of necessity, though. Everyone I knew had gone travelling for the summer, or returned to their home towns, or had left college. They all had a life. I did not. And, that summer, I became depressingly thinner and healthy. Depressingly, because I’d always have lodged somewhere in my memory the image of what I’d look like if I took care of my body, exercised, drank less and slept more. And, much as I’d love to be bright-eyed, clear-skinned and a size ten all the time, I’d much rather have a life, see my mates, drink alcohol, eat what I want and watch telly. It was a fair trade off, as far as I was concerned.
Now, however, I was lost all over again. Whilst Drew worked as a management consultant in Leeds, he lived in York. So on those days when he left work on time, he liked to drive straight home to spend time with his girlfriend. Also, when I finally saw Drew for the emotional tease he really was, I stopped calling him as much. Didn’t need to ring him up to say ‘hi’ or to just listen to his voice. Didn’t need to ring him to get a laugh. He was simply a good friend who I didn’t speak to that often.
My only real anchor in this city was Jess. And she liked to see her daughters and husband quite often, too. With only a handful of acquaintances in Leeds, and the knowledge that it’d be a while to get some – particularly if the Mel/Claudine/ lunch/mouth-foot thing was any indicator – I was forced to take refuge, once again, in the high-energy embrace of the gym.
This time, though, I was treadmilling or cycling, just to sort out my lungs. To make my cardiovascular system work properly. Nothing more. My hands, my body were going nowhere near any weights or complicated machinery. I knew my mind, all it’d take would be one well-timed movement in front of a mirror and I’d be launched back into trying to get that final year of college body again.
Just in case my body decided it was going to stay any longer than necessary in the gym, I wore the most ridiculous outfit: royal blue, daisy-covered cycling shorts and a baggy sweat top with ‘Michigan State’ emblazoned across it. My black socks were rolled down to just above my ankle bones and my trainers had seen better days. To stop my hair frizzing, I’d scraped my black bob under a scarf. Gorgeous was not the word for me. Truly.
I stood with my feet on either side of the treadmill’s moving part as I keyed in 30 mins to the treadmill.
I paused, stared at the LCD. A bit too ambitious for my first time here in eight years.
I pressed CLEAR, then keyed in 10 mins. Wimp. You’re a big girl’s blouse.
All right, 20 mins it is. I can do twenty minutes. No problemo.
I focused on the TV screen in front of me. The Simpsons was on. Without sound, though. In the background, around the gym, the constant beat of something lively and funky pulsed. It was designed to get you moving in time to it. To get you motivated and moving. The genesis of perpetual motion. I opted to walk quickly, but not in time to the music. If I wasn’t careful, I’d train myself to head to the gym every time I heard that beat. I’d become a Pavlov-type animal, not salivating every time I heard footsteps because I thought food was coming, but wanting to run everywhere, simply because I caught a snatch of something high-paced in a passing car. And th—
‘Hi, Ceri?’ A voice cut into my thoughts.
Without breaking stride, I turned to the person who’d spoken.
AAAGGGH! Claudine. Damn.
I might’ve known she’d frequent these parts. Very few people got those elongated, willowy looks with clear, glowy skin if you didn’t habitually visit the gym. Of course, the first night I make it here since receiving my training programme, she appears. And on the treadmill next to me. I’d spent the last few days keeping an eye out for her and Mel, then running away. Very fast. I still physically cringed at how I managed to fit the whole of my foot very neatly into my mouth. I hadn’t wanted to do that again. And now look.
‘Hi,’ I said brightly. Too brightly. That sounded fake. Like I’d been avoiding her and now was overcompensating. Which, of course, I was.
‘Are you all right?’ She stood with her legs wide open, each foot resting on the platform beside the moving part of her treadmill. She’d paused in keying in information into the treadmill display. ‘You looked pretty fierce just then. Is something bothering you?’
‘No.’ I jumped like I was doing a jumping jack, so I could get off the moving treadmill and stand with my feet on either side of it. My heart sprinted in my chest, my whole body heaved in my attempt to get more oxygen. ‘I’m fine.’ Breathless, but fine.
Claudine’s face became a picture of concern as she said: ‘You looked like you had something on your mind, that’s all. You can tell me if you want.’
‘I, erm, I was actually thinking about Pavlov’s dogs, brainwashing and music and if it’s possible to brainwash people in the same way that Pavlov did with the dogs, but using music.’
Claudine’s concern mutated to fear. With every moment her impression of me was lowering.
‘Really?’ she asked.
I nodded, aware that I sounded like a complete loon. ‘Unfortunately, yes. I don’t have big subjects like boyfriends to occupy my mind.’
‘Right.’ Claudine pulled the big red button on her treadmill display to get it working, hopped on then started walking. ‘You’d better not cool down too much, unless you’re about to stop.’
I hopped back onto the treadmill, started to walk again.
Beautiful as she was, Claudine was clearly proof of my gymlife relativity theory. She had trendy, up-to-date label gear that was obviously used. After about two seconds of warming up, which I was still doing, i.e. walking briskly, she started to jog. Slowly, at first, each step carefully considered, expertly dealt onto the machine. She’d obviously done this before, several times, regularly. Ergo, no life. The worst part, as she increased her pace, her slender arms pumping away, her long, svelte legs working without wobbling, was that there was no moisture in sight. Me? After five minutes of my brisk walking, my body was a tidal wave of sweat. Every ounce (I still hadn’t got around to metric-sizing my thoughts) of moisture in me was taking a day-trip to my outer epidermis. Claudine didn’t even have the decency to ‘glow’, she simply increased her stride, running. Now that was a concept, running. On a running machine.
My feet moved quicker. Didn’t want to be outdone. There was my pride at stake. My lungs, clearly left out of the pride rousing lecture, complained almost straight away. They burnt their displeasure into my chest. Piss off! my brain replied. No one outdoes us.
I monitored Claudine from the corner of my eye – each time she upped pace, I upped pace. I matched her stride for stride, step for step. Soon, we were running equally. Both of us heading for the imaginary finish line neck and neck. While she had eventually started to glow, rivers of perspiration washed down my back, making my top stick to me, oceans of the stuff cascaded down my face.
‘What are you doing after your workout?’ Claudine asked, over the din of the treadmills. She spoke in her normal tone of voice, she could even breathe, the bitch.
‘Whuh-huhow?’ I replied.
‘Yeah. I’ll only be doing an hour today. I was wondering if you fancied going for a drink afterwards?’
I tried to speak, my lungs refused (they’d gone on strike since that ‘piss off’ thing from my brain). I nodded, instead.
‘How long are you working out?’ she asked.
I gave up, slowed down. I’d never win against her in this race. I glanced down at the LCD display. Held up three fingers. ‘Three minutes.’
‘You’re not doing anything else?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘You really should do weights as well . . .’
Suddenly, things got nasty. Claudine’s mouth started spewing filth about more exercising. Workout, weights, swimming, muscle tone, endurance . . .
Why don’t you just call me a whore and be done with it?
The beer was divine on my tongue, in my mouth, sliding down my throat. I gulped at it the second the pint glass, cloaked in condensation, t
ouched my bottom lip. Claudine did virtually the same thing with her glass of wine.
‘See, isn’t that better?’ I almost said. I’d talked her out of that ‘workout’ nonsense and had flat out refused to sit with her if she ordered a soft drink.
‘Bliss in a glass,’ I gasped, finally giving my drink a reprieve.
‘You’re not wrong,’ Claudine said.
We both sighed deeply at the pleasure that could be found in the form of alcohol, then sat in silence as we contemplated how easily pacified we were. She left the air between us silent for a few seconds more before she asked: ‘Were you really thinking about Pavlov in the gym earlier?’
‘Um . . . yeah.’
‘I see,’ she said, eyeing me suspiciously. She sipped more of her drink. ‘I suppose being a psychologist those things come to you all the time. Kind of like an occupational hazard?’
There was that . . . there was also the fact it was a mad, scary world inside my head. I once spent the better part of a night thinking through the intricacies and possibilities of being battered to death with a teaspoon. I’d seen a news story about being battered to death by a hammer, the teaspoon thought process followed from there. Naturally.
‘I teach contemporary and cultural studies,’ Claudine said.
‘Oh. How long have you taught that then?’ I asked.
‘Since I finished at The Met. My tutor said I should think about doing a PhD because I’d done so well over the three years. So I signed up for a PhD at All Souls and eventually, when they realised they couldn’t get rid of me, they gave me a job. I’ve done it properly for two years now.’
‘Do you enjoy it?’
‘Yes and no, like most jobs I’d imagine. There are good times, there are bad times.’
‘I know what you mean. That’s why I left my job and London in the end. I found that the bad times were getting longer and longer and the good times were so few and far between that they’d virtually disappeared.’
‘What made you decide to do it then?’
‘No one thing. It all built up I guess. Then someone said something and I knew, kind of, what I had to do.’
‘God, they must be pretty wonderful. Who was it and what did they say?’
Claudine thought I was odd anyway, and I wasn’t trying to impress her, but she, like most people, wouldn’t understand the whole ‘Oprah told me to do it’ thing. And did I really want to still be repeating that line when I was very nearly thirty? ‘Oh, just a person,’ I supplied. ‘It’s been fun though, being able to start again.’ Fun and scary.
‘And it’s a nice place to do it at. Small, intimate. It’s like a family college. I like lecturing there.’
‘It seems nice,’ I agreed.
Claudine sipped her drink. ‘The thing with me and Mel is complicated. It’s not a simple case of us being friends and you being wrong about us. It’s . . . it’s so complex.’
I wasn’t shocked by this non sequitur in conversation – at all. If people who are about to invite me into their lives didn’t do odd little things like Ed had done a few nights earlier, they just blurted at me. Stopped mid-conversation and blurted.
It’d taken time to understand what was really going on with these confessions and heartfelt blurts. When blokes would spontaneously confess that they were single and looking to settle down/meet the right woman/fall in love, I’d used to think they were secretly coming on to me. I’d excitedly tell my friends about it and would sometimes go as far as asking them out. I’d only cottoned on after several blokes ran away at the very idea of dating me, and several more spent the ‘date’ unloading their hearts and minds and problems on to me, instead of flirting that I understood. I had booked an honest-to-goodness night out with the possibility of a snog at the end of it; they wanted a confidante, someone who wasn’t backward at coming forward with advice. Or, failing that, the phone number of that gorgeous woman they’d been after for ages.
I wasn’t stupid, just a dreamer. I still hadn’t completely accepted that Cupid, Venus, Eros or whoever governed the laws of love had a grievance against me. I lived in constant hope that a bloke would want to go out with me for me being me. Not a free therapist.
With women, I soon discovered their deeply personal blurts weren’t on a quid pro quo level; it wasn’t a precursor to a long and/or meaningful friendship. They didn’t want to know about my stories, my worries, they wouldn’t be there during my upsets or in my times of need; what they wanted was a non-friend to listen. Someone who couldn’t judge like a friend might. They latched onto Ceri, the listener, the someone who wouldn’t expect the favour returned in kind.
Sometimes it pissed me off, usually when I’d had a four-inthe-morning panic and knew that if Jess wasn’t around the next day to listen, I’d be carrying the weight of that panic around for days and weeks, because when it came down to it, more than half the people in my phone book didn’t want to know my problems.
But that disgruntlement was only sometimes. Most of the time I just put up with it. What else was I going to do, tell them I’m not interested?
‘What do you mean?’ I asked Claudine, my latest blurtee.
‘We . . . well, we’re very close,’ Claudine said.
‘I see,’ I replied.
Claudine cast her dark, smouldery eyes over me – assessing if I could handle the truth. Like you could tell by the cut of my jib how sturdy my mind was. Weak chin, weak mind.
‘Can you keep a secret?’ Claudine asked.
If I couldn’t I’d hardly say no, would I? I’d most likely not realise I couldn’t keep a secret. As it happened, I could keep a secret. I could keep several million secrets. My head was like the Fort Knox of secrets, except, of course, no one tried to break into my head to steal the twenty-four carat stuff stored in there. Not yet, anyway. ‘I can,’ I said.
Claudine swigged some French courage. ‘The thing is . . .’ more courage down her neck, ‘last year, that is, a few months ago, around Christmas . . .’ big gulp, ‘Mel and I, well, we . . .’
Made love? Wore each other’s underwear to work? Spent the limit on your credit cards on ice-cream?
‘Kissed.’
Right. And that’s bad is it? ‘Was it the first time it’d happened?’
‘It was a bit more than kissing.’
My mistake, shan’t interrupt again.
‘Quite a lot more, actually.’
I sipped my drink.
‘We were practically naked.’
I sipped more drink.
‘And in his bed.’
Sip.
‘And we were totally naked.’
Some kiss, I thought as I watched her from over the rim of my glass.
Claudine looked me in the eye as she delivered her next earth-stopping revelation. ‘We didn’t have sex, though. I didn’t want to do that to my boyfriend and Mel didn’t want to do that to his, er, wife.’
‘Mel’s married?’ I asked. I seem to remember him saying ‘I’m not seeing anyone special.’
Claudine twirled the stem of her wine glass between her forefinger and thumb; with the other hand she pulled wisps of her cropped hair around her face. ‘They split up not long after, you know.’
You didn’t have sex? ‘Ah. Right.’
‘Like I said, it’s complicated.’
‘I guess so. How about I get the next round in and you think of the least complicated way to tell me about it.’
‘Get me a large wine,’ Claudine called after me. ‘I’ll leave the car at college and get a cab home.’
The bar of the Fox & Hound, down by Horsforth train station resounded with dark broodiness. Most of it came from its dark wood interior, the lead pattening of the windows. We were sat in the larger of the two alcoves that looked out to the bar. We’d rested our exercised carcasses on highly upholstered booths beside the empty fireplace.
I stood on the foot rail and leant forwards over the bar, waiting for the barman to notice me. While I waited, I checked out the only other person at the
bar. He was leant across the bar too, waiting to be noticed, but his height excused him from needing the chrome foot rail. His body, leant across the bar as it was, turned him into a sleek line, like smooth easy brush strokes on a page. If I blurred my eyes he’d be colours and smudges against the dark canvas of the bar. More aesthetically pleasing than if I did it to other people in this bar. I stopped watching him before he caught me and I found myself in one of those eye contact situations. I concentrated, instead, on getting the barman’s attention. The barman was busily working through a large round. I’d probably get two rounds in at once, that would save me interrupting Claudine’s story by doing anything as wanton and thoughtless as needing more alcohol.
The hairs on the back of my neck tingled suddenly as though someone had stroked ice-cold fingers across the base of my skull. My head snapped round and my eyes connected with the man who looked like brush strokes on a page. Unusually for me, my eyes didn’t immediately rip themselves away, they were startled still. Startled by the way he was blatantly staring a hole into my head. He had his head slightly to one side, studying me as though I was something he’d just discovered under his microscope.
Worse, he didn’t even stop, now I was facing him. He continued to stare away like it was the most natural thing in the world to watch a woman who’d caught you watching her. I offered a very small, very nervous smile; he didn’t. He carried on staring for a few more seconds, then looked away, leaving an air of faint disapproval as he did so.
What the hell was that all about? I thought as my whole body burned in indignation at being so closely scrutinised. He’d probably even studied the huge flea bite that was developing on my neck.
I didn’t dwell on it for too long though. I had to listen to Claudine’s tale . . .
‘After that night, you know, the night we got naked and physical, everything about our lives changed. Mel . . .’ She paused, drank deep from her drink, then swished what was left around the bottom of the large wine glass. ‘Mel says he loves me. And that he’s in love with me.’ She sighed, glanced at me, was probably surprised to find my face interested but impassive. I was, in the main, unshockable. Not even Jerry Springer had thrown me – it may have disgusted me, but not shocked. I’d heard it all before – literally.