This morning, after her usual plate of scrambled eggs and avocado with hot sauce and a rare foray into the magical world of toast (mmmm, carbs), she was crackly with anticipation. This – the bikes, the crowd, the charity logo everywhere, her brother’s picture on the back of her shirt – it all felt real. As if everything she’d done in her life, the good choices and the bad had led her here … to the start of a Northern yellow brick road she hoped would deliver her to a place of self-forgiveness and peace and resolution about her brother. It was that, or be haunted by a genuine fear that all she’d done with her life was forsake her family in the single-minded pursuit of dance followed by an empty life in the limelight that looked glittery and nice but was, in fact, entirely forgettable. She wanted to make a difference. A real, genuine, difference. If Oprah suddenly up and died (god forbid, she was completely Kath’s hero), the world would notice. Millions would fall into a collective grief as they reflected upon the remarkable life of a sexually abused girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had helped so very many people along the way and, in the process, sold squillions of other people’s inspirational self-help books. If Kath were to disappear … maybe a column inch or two in The Sun? A chance for the station to reboot the morning programme? A new model bride for Kev? That’d be about it. Unless she took this chance to truly change, no matter the consequences.
Fola, clad in his usual workout gear – trainers, loose fitting t-shirt that showed off his broad shoulders, and slim line tracky bottoms – walked behind her. ‘If you really want to get the most out of this quad stretch, Katherine, you want to bend from here.’ She felt his fingers slip into the crease between her thighs and hips. ‘Lean forward, pushing your glutes back and your chest forward … Yeah. That’s right. Are you feeling it now?’
Oh, she was feeling it alright. Feeling all sorts of tingly, heated glitter bombs going off like popping candy in her ‘treasure chest’ as Kev liked to call it. Not that he’d gone on any treasure hunts lately. A thought which immediately made the feelings go away. Oprah wouldn’t lust after her trainer. Fola’s fingers shifted to her hips, causing her to twitch in all sorts of wicked ways. Oprah would probably have a female trainer anyway. A girl who’d won gold in a 800-metre race, barefoot, against the odds, wearing nothing but a hand-me-down tracksuit she’d been given by the Red Cross after her entire village had been swept away in a tsunami.
Kath stood up and took a couple of steps back from Fola. This had to stop. Unless it was actually love she was feeling.
Was it? She stared at him, willing his expression to tell her. He looked at her, confused. Not really the lovestruck expression she was after. More likely her feelings were the complicated, menopausal, rat’s nest of complexity all leading to one inevitable endgame: admitting that her marriage to Kevin had been a mistake.
‘Alright, Katherine?’
‘Yes. Wonderful,’ she lied, looking into his eyes again, desperate to see something, anything, that mirrored her experience. The flickers of heat when their hands brushed. The tightness in her chest when their eyes caught and meshed. The bone-deep ache for change.
‘I’ll just go help some of the others if that’s alright?’
Ah ha ha ha, she weird laughed. ‘You don’t have to ask my permission.’
He gave her a lightly perplexed look that said, I know that. I wasn’t asking your permission, I was just being polite.
Ah ha ha ha ha.
Quicksand, take me now.
She pulled her arm across her chest and pressed it flat with her other hand, feigning nonchalance. ‘Cool. Cool beans. I’ll just catch up with the crew and see you in ten for take-off?’
Fola squinted at her in the way a mother might examine their child before pressing a hand to their forehead to check for a fever. ‘Alright, Katherine. Maybe do a couple of calf stretches as well, okay?’ He stroked one of his very long-fingered hands along his calf, evoking a ripple of goose pimples along Kath’s belly.
‘Excellent suggestion. I’ll get on that.’ She made a show of lifting her heel to her bum and tugging on it, realising, too late, that she was not doing a calf stretch at all, but she’d already made a complete div of herself so why not commit? She pulled up her other foot and gave that a stretch, too. Balance, she reminded herself from countless yoga sessions, balance was everything.
Right then and there she vowed not to speak to Fola unless it was absolutely necessary. Doing anything else would be ridiculous. She didn’t want to have an affair. She wanted to make a difference. The way Oprah did. And Oprah did not get to where she was in life by crushing on her PT. So! It was time to put on the blinkers and go full steam ahead Oprah.
Her crush would go away, she would raise loads of money for LifeTime and hopefully, somewhere along the next one hundred and seventy-four miles she would get a sign from her brother that she hadn’t been all bad. It was that or carry on being a jowly, middle-aged, almost has-been on the brink of seeing both her marriage and her career swan dive into the forgettable depths of lite entertainment television.
‘Kath?’
