Helen Walne’s Human League
Charl killed me, but I think he might keep me alive. He made me roll around like a circus seal on a big red ball. He got me running backwards. He weighted me down and showed me how to dip low. I hate him. I love him.
It happens. One day, you’re 23, swigging beer out of a shoe, buying rollerblades that are too big for you, cycling to the pool drunk, where you swim 60 lengths without breaking a sweat. The next, you’re 39, gasping for breath, recycling the plastic of prepared meals, dreading the day you’ll have to squeeze into a costume and try to remember how to do butterfly. As we age, we become like moths, circling the light of work, home, work, home.
I have joined a gym. During my fitness assessment on the fancy machine, I asked Charl the trainer whether there was a Viking setting. “See, my ancestors were Vikings and they had really big bones.”
My body mass index showed I had outgrown my Viking bones by 0.8kg. I was technically overweight.
“Shed that, and you’ll be within the normal range,” smiled Charl.
After five minutes on the treadmill, I realised I’ll never be in a normal range. While others flapped their hands comfortably, their ears plugged into iPods and their takkies making sssshhink sssshink rhythms on the rubber, I gripped the bar so hard I accidentally bumped up the speed with my elbow. I sprinted. I flailed. I slid off the end like a backpack on a luggage conveyor.
I tried spinning. For the first three minutes, I smiled and closed my eyes. “I’m pedalling through French countryside,” I told myself. “l’m wearing a floaty skirt and am studying the violin. Around the corner, a man called Pierre is waiting for me at a café with a cognac and a loaf of bread.” Two minutes later, sweat dripped off my nose and my butt felt like it was coming adrift. After 10 minutes at 85 percent cadence (which, I discovered, is not a Scottish dance), I started going squint.
In the change room, shaky and delirious, I attempted to open someone else’s locker with my key. After trying to bite the padlock open with my teeth, I turned to ask for help. It was like being at a Hugh Hefner party. Everyone was naked.
Here, a woman smeared lotion on her body. There, a tiny smudge of a woman was doing nude blow-drying. Next to me, an elderly swimmer peeled off her costume, revealing skin the texture of elephant knees. I whimpered, averted my eyes to the TV, saw Libya, then scampered into a toilet stall and peered at my key. “Zenith” was embossed on it in tiny print. I matched the key to the padlock, grabbed my bag and drooled out of the gym in a flushed haze.
Back at home, B and I compared notes. He had also signed up, and according to the machine at his gym he had outgrown his Celtic fighting-man bones by about 10kg. I couldn’t help but feel pleased.
“All the women were naked,” I whispered, my eyes wide. “And I saw a man reading a book on a bicycle.”
“Yes, well, I saw a man with gorilla arms squeezing his back acne in the mirror,” he replied. “And I saw a weightlifter pumping iron and going ‘waaaah, waaaah’.” B rose stiffly from the couch and imitated the man dropping his weights to the floor and bouncing on his feet.
“Can’t we just lie on the Power Plates all day and drink beer?” I wailed.
That night, we followed our gym-issued eating plan: steamed fish, brown rice, vegetables. Still hungry afterwards, B ate a rice cake with fat-free cottage cheese. “Mmmm,” he murmured. “If milk could defecate, cottage cheese would be its stools.”
The next day we were back. I used the shoulder machine backwards. B couldn’t swim because his Celtic head split his cap. I tamed the treadmill but couldn’t change the channel on the built-in TV screen, so spent 20 minutes watching Italian rugby.
After a week, I checked in with the fancy machine. Apart from having lower blood pressure and two percent less body fat, I had defied my Viking bones by 1.5kg. I was now normal.
Ecstatic and puffed up, I hit the rowing machine. I watched a man on TV being found guilty of killing his kids. I ripped a muscle in my neck. I cried “waaaah, waaaah”.