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‘I hate change,’ I said, amazed I hadn’t fainted. ‘I’m too old for it.’ On my bandwidth immediately, she countered, ‘Oh, change is the best thing about life. Everything changes all the time. Change or die, I say.’ Her speaking to me hadn’t altered her long, slow rowing action. I stood and frankly admired her as one might admire a beautiful animal. She looked candidly back at me and didn’t seem to mind a bit. I windmilled my arms forwards for 20 turns then 20 back, as I always do to begin my workout. ‘And now I’m about to do the same old workout I’ve been doing for months,’ I said. Then I walked over to the other side of the gym to stretch on the mats.
A few minutes later she came over, selected a pair of six-kilogram dumb-bells from the nearby rack, faced the mirror and started punching the air with them. Nothing wobbled. I was in a forward lunge, right leg forward, arms raised. ‘You say that,’ I said from my empowering stance to her reflection in the mirror. ‘But I haven’t noticed much change going on in your life lately.’ Here I was being audacious. This was tantamount to a confession that I’d been clocking her and her husband working out together in the gym. Perhaps she recognised it as such. Because instead of asking how I could possibly know anything about her life, she cradled a dumb-bell against her jaw and said, ‘I’ve left him.’ Then she resumed her measured pumping into the air of the dumb-bell.
I changed legs.
Three weeks ago, she said, she left the man she’d been living with since she was 19. And now she was trying to build a new life and bring up three children single-handed in a tiny flat and pay the bills. It hadn’t been easy so far, but in her case it was change or die, she said. She was now searching for a new man in her life. That wasn’t going to be easy either. She figured that if she could regain the happiness and confidence she once had in herself and her body, she’d be able to attract a good man to her with the unconscious power of her mind.
I couldn’t help myself. Someone had to say it. Beacons must have been lit on the surrounding hills when the news of this woman’s split from her husband had got out. ‘But look at you!’ I said. ‘You look fantastic! You’ve got to be the best looking woman in town by a mile! They must be queuing around the block!’ But she only wanted a man who did what he said he was going to do, she said, with quiet dignity. She was tired of the others. And men like that were few and far between.
‘That rules me out, then,’ I said, relieved, putting my head on my right knee. A new thought made her momentarily rest a dumb-bell against her cheek again while she scrutinised it. ‘Come and see me at work,’ she said. ‘Raptures. At the end of the ally next to Superdrug. We could talk about you as a stopgap. And if nothing else I could do you a lovely massage.’ ‘Who do I ask for?’ I said, prostrating myself before her in the Child’s pose. ‘Trixabell,’ she said. ‘I’m there on Tuesdays.’ ‘Jeremy,’ I said, thanking God that the lockers had been moved.
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