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.’
I made sympathetic noises and dropped down onto the mat to start my own stretches, and we were still chatting away about nothing much as we started our workout together. I noticed Mike glancing over to us, a benevolent smile on his battered ex-boxer’s face.
It was he who, a few months back, after he’d given me what passed for a formal induction into the gym – where everything was, how everything worked, how to secure the weights on the bars, that sort of thing (the more advanced stuff, he said, he’d show me as I went along) – had said, ‘In the