‘What, you mean you’re not? I mean, no offence, but I kind of assumed you were just being discreet about your love life, on account of being my boss and all.’
‘There’s nothing to be discreet about,’ I said wearily.
Robbie shook his head and tutted. ‘And there I was thinking you just had high standards, and that’s why you weren’t seeing anyone.’
‘Well, I do have high standards. Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Not me. I mean, sometimes a shag is just a shag. And I seem to have worked my way through most of the hot guys on Grindr who live close enough for a booty call, so…’ Robbie did a gesture that made him look exactly like the shrug emoji.
I felt a wave of envy for this boy, so casually, confidently in charge of his sex life. How much had I missed out on, all those years when I’d been longing and waiting for Joe to somehow magically reappear in my life? Never mind in the months since he had.
‘And you don’t even have to lower your standards!’ he went on. ‘I mean, come on. You’d be starting from scratch. You’d have your pick of the crop. I could help you write an online dating profile, and Archie who runs the beer shop next door is an ace photographer, I happen to know. You could have a new bloke every day for months without running out.’
I thought, I don’t want a new bloke every day for months. I just want one. One special one.
But I said, ‘You might be on to something. Let me give it some thought. But in the meantime, we’ve got the bean burgers to make for lunch, and those carrots that were on special are looking a bit sad, so we should turn them into soup. And I’m not sure those avocados are ripe yet, so we might have to do hummus instead of avo smash on the snack menu.’
‘On it,’ Robbie said, doing a brief juggling performance with three of the bendy carrots, keeping the limp vegetables together in the air as easily as he managed his multiple men.
Three
You’ve been thinking. Made up your mind yet? Remember, fortune favours the brave and love will only find those who look for it.
For the next few hours, I successfully managed to avoid thinking about my love life – or rather my lack of one. I made a batch of sourdough bread and left the loaves to prove. I seared a mountain of mutton for a curry and ground a load of brick-red spice paste to flavour it. I made breakfasts, brunches and lunches to order.
And when three o’clock came and it was time for my break, I was determined not to start thinking then, either, if I could possibly help it.
‘I’m heading to the gym,’ I told Robbie.
‘Cool,’ he said. ‘I’m off to get my eyebrows threaded.’
And so we left the pub together, but then went our separate ways, Robbie to Alina’s chichi salon on the high street (which I kept meaning to visit myself to get the untamed jungle of my bikini line sorted, but then kept not bothering because, really, what was the point?), and me to the Dark Arch, the gym under the railway tracks.
I’d never been much of a gym bunny before. Well, to be honest, I’d never been one at all. The idea of joining a Zumba class set my teeth on edge, spin bikes left my bits so bruised I couldn’t sit down for a week and, like I said, my enthusiasm for yoga had petered out after about three classes. So when I’d been working with Sean, my ex, at our food cart at the local market and a guy asked if I’d mind him leaving a few flyers on our stand for the new fitness studio he was opening, I’d agreed, with no intention of ever going there myself.
But then I’d picked one up, just out of curiosity. And, just out of curiosity, I’d dropped in later that day to take a look. At first I wasn’t sure I’d come to the right place. The signage was spray-painted like graffiti on the metal roll-up shutters that covered the front of the railway arch. The entrance was a small door to the side, with a threshold across it that could have been put there intentionally to trip unwary feet. Inside, it was dark and cavernous, and would have been echoey if it hadn’t been for the black rubber matting that covered every inch of the floor.
There were no piles of fluffy towels, no smiling receptionists, no lush plants in pots. There was nothing at all that suggested leisure or luxury: just racks of shining chrome bars and black rubber-coated weights, mysterious pieces of machinery that looked like they might attack you if you got too close, and bars and pulleys fixed to the walls like something out of a sex dungeon – or at any rate, like I imagined a sex dungeon might look. Right now, my chances of ever going to one seemed about as good as my chances of taking a trip on Virgin Galactic – and I wasn’t sure which of the two I’d find more terrifying. The only colour in the place came from a stack of brightly painted iron balls that I later found out were called kettlebells.
I was about to step right back out again and never return when I saw a woman in one of the shadowy corners, lit by a string of fluorescent red lights. She had one of the silver bars over her shoulders, laden with weights, and she was doing squats. She was about my age, and slim like me, and the plates looked huge on her shoulders. I could see her face contort with effort as she moved the bar, but she managed it, and when she’d replaced it on its rack there was a smile of pure, triumphant happiness on her face.
And I thought, I want to be able to do that.
Almost a year later, I still couldn’t. Not that heavy, anyway. But I was getting there, and I was hooked. I loved the smell of the place: rubber and sweat and disinfectant. I loved the sounds of iron meeting iron, people gasping with effort, heavy weights thunking on the rubber floor. I loved the new muscles that had appeared with surprising speed on my arms and thighs, and the calluses that had appeared on my hands alongside the ones left by my chef’s knives.
Most of all, I loved how, when I came here, there was no space in my head for anything at all except the awareness of what my body was doing, the effort every move took, the longing for it to be over, the elation when it was.
Now, walking through the door felt like stepping into my happy place – which I guess it was. Mike, the owner, was on the phone, but waved a greeting. The woman I’d noticed on my first day there was in her usual spot by the far wall, doing some warm-up stretches. I walked over to join her, dropping my bag next to hers.
‘Hey, Zoë.’
‘Hey, Dani. How’s it going?’
Dani stood up, took a gulp from her water bottle and twisted the bobble more securely around her ponytail. When I’d started at the gym, her beauty had been one of the many things about it that had intimidated me. Her mahogany-coloured hair was always straightened and glossy, even when she was literally wringing sweat out of it. Her arms and legs were long, smooth and perfectly tanned. She always wore make-up, and even the toughest workout didn’t seem to shift it. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of one of those Instagram posts with a #fitspo hashtag.
‘Ugh, same old, same old,’ she said. ‘Started work at seven this morning, and as soon as I sat down a patient was screaming down the phone at me because he’d forgotten his appointment and we’d charged him for it and somehow that was all my fault. I was tempted to tell him to adjust his own bloody braces if that suited him better, but I didn’t, obviously.’