heavily onto the ground. Charlotte, a needy, comes in last. She grins as she faces outwards, shrugging, unbothered, her face red from running. I smile at her as the word ‘DESPERATE!’ is called and feet thump around me once again.
‘CRAZY!’ Oh, me again. We all laugh, acknowledging the total lack of break we’ve had from the last run. Our breath comes out thick and heavy. It’s hard to run fast when you’re laughing so much. We run backwards, we scurry back to our places, we swap directions. NEEDY, DESPERATE, CRAZY, DESPERATE, NAGGING, NEEDY, NAGGING, CRAZY … I’ve never laughed at these words before. They are words that I’m usually incapable of having a sense of humour about. Because these words are always loaded. Even if the man holds his hands up and says, ‘Oh come on, I was only joking’, you cannot laugh, not properly, because these words are never a joke, they are only ever a method of control. But today, times are a changing. I run and run and I see these silly labels for the silly labels they are. I shoot back to a memory of Ryan standing over me as I cried in the corner because he told me I was too fat and he couldn’t get an erection because of it. ‘God, why are you crying, AGAIN? You’re crazy.’ And I see the craziness of that word being used, when my behaviour was the most normal response to what he’d just said. ‘I wasn’t crazy,’ I whisper as I run, thud thud thudding on the floor. ‘You made me crazy.’
I’ve never truly believed that before, no matter how many times Megan protested it. But with endorphins surging through my blood, and other women jogging around and laughing at that word with me, the message begins to bed in. It curls up in my soul, nestling in, and part of me releases a tiny squib of tension I’ve been holding in for years.
Nobody stays out for very long. The instructor keeps saying ‘Oh, don’t worry, just join back in’ so we can all continue playing. The air is loaded with giddy. We land our feet in unison. Our hair swings madly from side to side. We apologise whenever one of us gets too excited and accidentally runs into the back of someone else.
‘WHEN THEY GO LOW!’
‘CRAZY, DESPERATE!’
‘THE PATRIACHY’S COMING!’
In the last round, she calls ‘WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER’, the signal that everyone has to get up and run in a circle. It becomes more of a conga line than a circle – too many of us in the hall to really run properly. We hold each other’s clammy shoulders, getting one another’s sweat smeared into our palms, we push each other through the tiredness, draining ourselves of the very last droplets of energy. My face feels redder than it’s ever felt in my life. I’m sweating out of every pore of my body. We all are. Ugly and breathless, but smiling and powerful.
‘Right, game over! Let’s dance it out to finish!’ The speakers crank on. ‘Just a Girl’ by No Doubt blasts out. We all whoop like we’re in a nightclub. I’m skanking like I used to as a teen, and everyone around me is doing the same. No one is dancing to look pretty. Half of us are screaming along with the lyrics. I jump, flick more sweat around. I’ve never felt happier than in this moment. Charlotte is next to me, yelling along even louder. Her sweaty arms are around me. We pogo up and down. I feel drunk with happiness. Lost in whatever is happening. We all are. We scream out the final words, punching our fists into the air, swinging some of the bags. Then the song dies, and it’s quiet again. We become two dozen female strangers, soaked through in sweat, hugging one another in a tiny dilapidated hall.
‘Well done ladies. That was a great one. Oh my God, it is hot in here. Luckily the shower is just about working.’
We let go of one another but the bond doesn’t feel broken. Charlotte is eyeing me, her cheeks raised with her smile. ‘So, how did you find it?’
‘That is the weirdest but best thing I’ve done in a while.’
‘Isn’t it? It’s like kick-boxing slash crazy children’s-birthday-party slash trauma recovery slash dance party.’ We walk towards our pegs and stop by Charlotte’s otter sticker. ‘Some of us go for a drink after, if you’re up for it? There’s one tiny shower