Growing friendship

I used to see Tom now and again at the local gym. I’d be on the treadmill and he’d be in front of the mirror lifting weights. He was already big then, but he was all chest and shoulders and no legs and the disproportion looked ridiculous. Broad at the top, he seemed to taper down to a point. Also, his shoulders were too high, too level and too immobile. One day this inverted triangle with blond hair flopping over a spotty schoolboy face spoke to me. He appeared on the next treadmill and said he’d just been outside to do some sprints on the football pitch, but abandoned the idea because there was too much dogs’ excrement underfoot. His soft voice and careful enunciation surprised me.

My dislike of this local gym — the too-cold air-con, the tinny rap music, the lazy, narcissistic attendants, just to name a few bones of contention — intensified to the point where I stopped going there and went instead to a gym ten miles further away. About three months later, I began seeing Tom here, too. He was now about one third as big again, and the disproportion between top and bottom even more marked. His acne was worse, too. The inflamed spots on the upper slopes of his back were as big as five pence pieces. He was always downstairs, sweating with the lads in the weights’ room, while I prefer to be upstairs on the treadmills and cross-trainers with the ladies. But one day our paths crossed in the changing room and he told me how he had also given up trying to like our local gym, and now caught the bus out to here.

That was how we became acquainted. We saw ourselves as a pair of refuseniks. Whenever I bumped into him after that we would stop and have five minutes of hate of our local gym, scornfully listing its failings. He was amused and a little shocked by the vehemence of my condemnation, I think, because until then he’d always seen me as a quiet, undemonstrative type of person.

One day he asked me for a lift home, and on the way he told me about himself. Two years ago he had been anorexic, he said. He was much more attractive to the opposite sex when he was thin. He could go to a party and take his pick. There was no doubt about it, he preferred himself as an anorexic.

He lived at home with his mother. His father had left them when he was seven and his stepfather had left a fortnight ago. When he left school he wanted to train to become a qualified gym attendant. He had very little money, but what he did have he spent on body-building drinks and supplements, about which he knew everything, including where to get the best deals on the internet. He trained every day except Sunday. Each day he concentrated on a different part of his body. Monday was thighs, for example. He’d never taken steroids, but they fascinated him and he was sometimes tempted to try them. I liked this frank, well-spoken, fatherless schoolboy. He looked so huge and uncomfortable squeezed into the passenger seat of my car; it was like sitting next to the Incredible Hulk.

The next time I gave him a lift home, he told me one of his mates had begun injecting steroids and the muscle gains had been so immediate and impressive that he had now made up his mind to start injecting them as well. I was shocked, I said. I didn’t know he had any mates. Tom said he was quietly excited. It was inevitable, really, he said. If he injects steroids, he said, he’ll gain as much extra muscle in a fortnight as he would in a year without them. Normally he wouldn’t have been able to afford the drug, but yesterday the school bursar called him into her office and gave him a government cheque for a hundred pounds. He gets one now and again as an attendance bonus.

What about the side effects, I ask him. The notorious ‘roid rage’. The shrinking manhood. The strain on the old ticker. And if you get any bigger, I said, you won’t fit into the car. The rages, he said, are the inevitable consequence of the feeling of omnipotence that comes with getting bigger all the time. The other side effects, he said, are the result of steroid abuse, not use.

I pulled up outside his mum’s council house and he methodically extricated himself from my car. I’ve not seen him since and I’m a bit worried about the lad. I hope he’s OK and hasn’t exploded or something. My guess is that he’s left us amateurs trailing in his obsessive wake and has found a gym with a thriving steroid culture.