by Alexei Sayle
‘About the same as a high-class prostitute,’ Harriet had once remarked to her friend Rose.
‘Darling, how naïve you are,’ Rose had replied. ‘You’ve no idea how much some men would pay for the right hole. Especially if it’s telling them things they want to hear.’
Looking over her shoulder she smiled at her building and thought, I own that. Harriet’s shop was in the middle of the parade and sat alongside a number of ethnic businesses such as Halal Meat And Videos and a Turkish social club, some businesses that catered to the newer, more wealthy inhabitants of the area like a fromagerie and a gift shop and gallery called Galerie Giscard d’Estaing of which she was the best customer. There was an old-style hardware store that was very useful and a Valueslasher Mini Market for the white working classes. On the corner there was a pub and over the road in the other direction a sweet little railway station with cream-painted filigree fretwork edging the platform canopy and a slate roof, from which trains ran into the Lagos-like madness of Finsbury Park and past whose silent platform late at night slid sinister grey trains carrying nuclear waste from the power plants on the Suffolk coast to the north near Penrith, where the people didn’t matter as much, where it was stored in leaky concrete holes in the ground.
It was a guilty pleasure for Harriet that she held the freehold of the whole building; she thought she shouldn’t be the sort of person who took pleasure in property, that she should be wild and free and ready to move to New Zealand at a moment’s notice, nevertheless it was the thing Harriet secretly felt proudest of that she’d had the sense to buy, even though some months the mortgage repayments could still be a problem, before prices in the area went completely mad.
The road curved east, giving her the first view of the gym towards which she was heading. Housed in a former five-storey garment factory, a stocky cube of a building faced with yellow brick, the ground floor was now occupied by her gym which was called Muscle Bitch — it was one branch of a middle-market chain with an all-female clientele. Harriet had joined three months ago on her thirty-eighth birthday. The three-month introductory, membership had been an unsubtle birthday present from her sister Helen. Harriet liked to think there was-nobody better at buying presents than her: she possessed a comprehensive collection of jewellery brochures, a definitive list of florists, extensive contacts amongst muffin basket vendors and each gift she gave to someone was crafted for their particular personality and was a joy to own. Whereas the presents her sister gave, at least to Harriet, were invariably an imposition: they always required her to go somewhere and do something, a voucher for beginners’ violin lessons, a three-week walking tour in the Alpujarras or a course of introductory Arabic in a. six CD boxed set.
When Harriet had reluctantly gone to join the gym the man in the suit who filled in the membership forms and took her voucher as if it was contaminated went off to find a teacher to devise her exercise programme and was gone for a very long time. Occasionally people who looked like instructors would stick their heads round the door then withdraw them quickly when they saw her.
Nearly half an hour passed before the manager came back trailed by a tall, slim but muscular, pale-skinned young man with close-cropped blond hair, who had the name Patrick stitched on the breast of his light green instructor’s polo shirt.
‘This is Patrick,’ the manager said redundantly, ‘he’s said he’ll show you what to do.’
‘Great, thanks, great,’ Harriet babbled, grateful that at last somebody was prepared to take her on. Without a word the young man turned into the body of the gym with its sweet smell of air freshener mingling with the clang of weights rising and falling. As she dragged around behind him Patrick would brusquely order Harriet to climb into a machine, he would strap her in,’ belt her up and then tilt her heavy body backwards so that her legs were spread wide apart and all her fat tipped towards the floor; after that he would lean across her prone body to minutely adjust something, with her thinking that this was much closer than she would ever normally get to a stranger. Harriet held herself stiff as her nose brushed his sinewy white skin and her breath riffled his translucent, pale eyelashes.
After a few strained pushes on each machine at weights with the combined heaviness of a couple of mice, Patrick marked out on a pale yellow card what she should do during subsequent visits then abruptly left her, still pinioned inside a machine, without a word.
Harriet had not wanted to get changed at the gym, exposing her hectares of dimpled flabby skin to the other women, so she walked home in the clothes she’d worked out in, the icy wind drying her sweat in salty rings on the towelling fabric of her tracksuit.
After the trauma of the induction she almost didn’t return to Muscle Bitch but in the end found herself unwilling to add the gym to the long list of things she had given up on after one visit or lesson, things such as archery, dry-stone wall building or introductory Arabic. Harriet was determined that ‘going to the gym’ would at least be on the slightly shorter list of things she’d abandoned after a few months, along with learning to play the violin and Marxism.
So over the next couple of months once or twice a week, experiencing an inner sense of dread as if going in for painful and embarrassing minor surgery, she would drag herself there along the pavement.
It was only the thought of Patrick being there to help her through it that persuaded her to make the trip. He always seemed to be the one nearby when she needed somebody to hit the emergency stop button on the treadmill, to lift some weights off her or to whisper that she was trying to do leg presses on an arm curl machine and when, as often happened, she became confused at the settings on the machines, unsure whether ‘15’ was the weight or the seat height it was always him she would seek out for advice.
Harriet would rather have gone to the gym during the day when the place was presumably emptier but a sense of guilt kept her constantly in the shop from nine to five so she was forced to attend in the evenings when the place was always packed with demented women, running on the treadmills, crazed expressions on their faces, dancing madly as if auditioning for A Chorus Line or pedalling static bikes as though pursued by hordes of mounted cossacks with rapine on their minds. Yet amongst the frantic female crowd Patrick seemed to glide with solemn composure. Finding herself oddly comfortable with his looming, sallow presence, Harriet assumed, although he gave no sign of it, that he felt some sort of fondness for her. All the same, she realised, the main reason their relationship grew was because he was the only instructor that she ever saw twice. The entire staff of the gym, including the receptionists, the office staff and the cleaners — all the small Mediterranean muscled men and the slender blonde South African girls — seemed to change entirely between each of her visits.
At first Patrick struggled conscientiously to perform his job with Harriet, to encourage her to push herself, to strain after progress, to work her body. ‘Cccc’mon!’ he would growl, or ‘Yes, yes, that’s good!’ but throughout all the damp hours she spent at Muscle Bitch none of her weights or reps went up at all. Harriet could just about chest press five kilos — the lowest weight — on her first visit and she was still just about chest pressing five kilos now, three months later. After a while Patrick had given up trying to be a motivator and simply sat down next to her staring into space or chatting in a disjointed fashion.
He seemed to be able to talk at length without Harriet actually getting much information about his life. He possessed a strange elliptical way of speaking about himself, mentioning the names of people without any context so that she thought she’d found out things about him but was never entirely sure. There seemed to be a child and possibly a mother, though whether they lived with him or not remained obscure, and there definitely seemed to be a best friend called Martin who had a great deal of sage advice though Martin might have been a cat, and there’d possibly been an important trip to Belgium but perhaps not. It was hard to know even what age he was; given the number of things he’d done he had to be at least in his late twen
ties though sometimes to her he seemed little older than a child.
Indeed Patrick never seemed younger to Harriet than when one day, more direct than usual, he told her that he would really like to be a stunt man in the movies. She grabbed on to this solid piece of biography and pressed him to expand. ‘You have to be at Olympic level in two sports, though, and you have to, like, know people in the business,’ he told her. She shyly said that she often repaired costumes for theatre and film productions and knew a few people in the business but he didn’t seem interested in any practical help she could offer. Patrick’s speech, usually flat, became more animated as he went on. ‘They have this annual stuntman’s ball every year, right? And when the bloke announces who you are at the entrance to the ballroom, you have to come in and throw yourself down the stairs, to get to like where the tables are and the dance floor and that …‘ He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know whether the wives and girlfriends have to throw themselves down the stairs too. I suppose if they were stuntwomen themselves they could but walking down the stairs would be optional…‘ Harriet got the feeling from his tone that he thought the wives and girlfriends really should throw themselves down the stairs too, even if they weren’t stuntwomen, out of loyalty.
When she checked in to the gym with her personalised swipe card, the entrance way, as it-often was, was filled almost entirely with red and purple balloons, making her feel as if she’d walked into a giant berry pie.
‘Hi, er…’ said the female receptionist brightly, reading her name off the computer screen,’… Harriet, you coming to the party then?’
There was frequently a party at the gym that went with the balloons though sometimes there were just balloons for their own sake. ‘No, I don’t think so. What’s this one in aid of?’
‘It’s going to be great,’ the receptionist explained breathlessly. ‘Relay run on the treadmills from London to Penrith for the Fairground Disaster Fund — one of the girl’s brothers ran a hoopla stall in the path of the Ferris wheel — and, well, you know… the party’s compulsory for the staff so I won’t get home until after midnight but hey! ‘That’s great too.’
Feeling as if she was already carrying heavy weights, Harriet passed into the interior of Muscle Bitch and moved amongst its crowd of grunting women. Her exercise programme was the usual mixture of light weight-lifting and aerobic exercises. After some half-hearted stretching that usually gave her backache, she climbed into a sort of bathtub-cum-recumbent bicycle with a TV screen clamped on the front of it. She was supposed to pedal the bathtub for twenty minutes round a badly computer-rendered tropical island shown on the TV screen. After only a quarter of her allotted time she would usually steer the bathtub over the edge of Pirates Cliff or pedal out to sea from Mermaid Beach, hoping to drown or be smashed to bits on the rocks of Coconut Inlet, but the implacable computer inside the machine simply steered her back to dry land, generally after a stern fish told her not to be so silly.
Sweatily pedalling around the imaginary island, Harriet’s thoughts were on a journey of their own to an equally uncomfortable destination. She realised that she had for some time been approaching the point invariably reached in her efforts at self-improvement — Giving Up Cove.
A few years before, she had been introduced to an Iraqi man at a party by her friend Lulu. Lulu said this man was a healer who had completely cured her mother’s arthritis and she was sure he could do the same for Harriet’s obesity. Filled with optimism at a cure for fatness that required her to do nothing, she visited him at his shabby rented rooms in Harley Street and for ninety pounds a session he wrapped her in hot towels and prodded and pinched her body seemingly at random. At the end of six hours’ ‘treatment’ she had gained nearly half a stone, so Harriet told him she was emigrating to Argentina and stopped the visits. A few weeks later she bumped into Lulu’s mum who told Harriet that her b arthritis was worse than ever and she wished she was dead.
One thing, however, that had stayed with her from her six sessions with the grave Iraqi, apart from the half a stone, was a phrase he’d used. In attempting to describe the complexity of her mind, he had endeavoured to liken the inside of Harriet’s head to the Boeing Corporation. The healer had wanted to conjure up a vision of rows and rows of desks, mile upon mile of tiny office workers dedicated to the elaborate business of managing Harriet’s thought processes and actions. Except he ruined the profundity of it by pronouncing the Boeing Corporation as ‘the Booing Corporation’. To her this seemed a much more apt metaphor for her thinking — not a huge, efficient global planemaker but instead the Booing Corporation: a gigantic organisation installed inside her head dedicated to the business of booing, heckling and general discouragement of any kind of positive behaviour. The only time the Booing Corporation ever became encouraging was when they were suggesting it might be a really good idea to eat a whole frozen tuna pie at six thirty in the morning. Except, as her wobbling legs strained against the pedals and perspiration rolled down her face, she resolved that this time things were going to be different, this time she had a foolproof plan to get fit and lose weight.
Two weeks before, sitting in the place where she went to be ritually abused about the state of her hair, she’d read an article in an old copy of Marie Claire concerning an incredibly fat woman, much fatter than her, who’d got fit and slim simply by hiring a personal trainer. There were snaps of the woman when she’d been fat, at family> parties and at long tables in restaurants, smiling dazedly into the lens like a barnyard animal that somebody had put a wig and big glasses on. Funnily enough Harriet thought to herself all these ‘before’ photos were fuzzy as if the camera itself was angry at the woman for being such a gigantic pig. Then there were pin-sharp, acid-bright pictures of the way the woman was now, youthful, thin and confident, her face full of happy intelligence. That was what Harriet was going to do, that was her plan: she was going to ask Patrick if he’d be her personal trainer.
Harriet was pedalling the bathtub through what was either a tropical forest or some animal heads stuck on spikes when Patrick came over.
‘Hiya,’ he said, picking up her chart. ‘How’s it going?’
‘It’s going at exactly the same speed as it was three months ago.’
‘Yeah…‘ he replied, studying the exercise machine’s digital readout, ‘your laptime’s identical to the second; it’s a remarkable achievement in its way.’
‘What way’s that exactly?’
Patrick shrugged. ‘Well, you know it isn’t really any sort of achievement but they like us to be positive.’
‘I’m getting sick of this place,’ she said.
‘Well, you need to stick with it, not get discouraged…‘ He struggled to find something more inspirational to say, ‘or… something.’
‘No, no,’ she persisted. ‘Patrick, I do sincerely want to get fitter but this gym isn’t working. So I was thinking… do you do personal training?’
‘Personal training?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Harriet realised she was talking fast now but couldn’t stop. ‘I’ve got this big empty room above my shop, nice springy wood floor, and I was talking to a couple of girlfriends Lulu and Rose and we … they thought we could sort of hire you to come round and give us a workout, a personalised programme, personal training. What do you think, what do you think?’
He’ paused for several seconds then said, looking around, ‘We’re not supposed to make side deals with the clients.’
‘Oh come on,’ she wheedled, ‘please … I’m never going to get into shape here. We both know that. I assume you’ve done personal training before, most of the instructors here have, it must have been part of your own training.’
‘Yeah, sure, obviously …‘ He was silent for a further moment then asked, ‘You’d pay me?’
‘Yes of course, whatever the going rate is … I dunno, forty pounds an hour?’
He considered a little longer then said, ‘Well, I suppose the gym don’t need to know about it. I guess I could com
e round one afternoon next week to meet your friends and work out … you know, a personalised programme and that.’
One of the muscular dykey weight-lifting women had asked Patrick to ‘spot’ for her, that is to stand above her while she bench-pressed the weight of a small car, to make sure that she wouldn’t be crushed by the chromed bar if her strength suddenly went. In fact he wasn’t giving her any attention at all but was thinking about what it might be like to be a personal trainer. It was kind of stupid that Harriet thought anybody at Muscle Bitch, least of all him, held any qualifications, unless you thought looking nice in a tight. polo shirt counted as a qualification.
Not that it was a particular shock for him to be asked to do something he didn’t know anything about. He didn’t have any memory of it happening when he was a kid but sometime around the time he became a teenager Patrick began to notice people would always be asking his opinion on stuff when he only had the vaguest idea what they were talking about. At school the teachers would often turn to him to answer questions on all kinds of subjects and even when his replies were stumbling or just plain wrong many times they acted as if he’d said something dead intelligent and when they marked his essays he got grades that were much better than he reckoned his confused ramblings on ox-bow lakes or the rise of the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany really deserved. For the longest time Patrick couldn’t explain it, beginning to think that perhaps he was brighter than he thought he was: until he failed every single one of his GCSEs.