“Frank thinks Mark’s got a thing going with Fran,” Elsie burst out, tinkling the ice in her glass. “Cause he was always over there on Tuesday afternoons.”
“We used to watch films on Tuesday afternoons,” Mark said with a shrug to Andy. Andy could have sworn he saw a blush in the gaps between tattoos. “He’s daft. People will talk about anything.” Mark was cross about the whole business, really, since the idle gossip had meant an end to video afternoons with Fran. They used to share a bottle of Country Manor and watch TV movies. The video shop down the precinct rented tapes of those cheapo weepies. They were usually true-to-life stories, about people with something wrong with them or lives that turn suddenly tragic. Both Mark and Fran loved them, especially the endings, where the screen turns black and captions go up to explain what has happened to the real lives of the real people since the events of the film. He blamed Elsie for stirring up the trouble, and thought about taking her to task about it now. She had got the neighbours talking about how Fran spent secluded indoor afternoons with Mark Kelly, her living-room blinds drawn, even in high summer. She spent days indoors with a man on the dole, while her own husband was out at work. But that was all over now.
Elsie asked, “How’s Sam and the new baby?” Mark gritted his teeth. Was she setting out to be deliberately offensive?
“Last I saw of them they were fine.”
“That’s his ex-wife,” Elsie mouthed to Andy. “And the bairn’s by her new feller. Bob the policeman, he’s called, isn’t he?”
“That’s right,” Mark sighed.
“Eeh,” Elsie went. “There’s new life all over, isn’t there? Things going on?”
Andy broke in, “There’s Jane coming in, Elsie. You’re friendly with her, aren’t you?”
Elsie whirled round to see Jane coming in wearing her best green dress, shoving her seven-year-old son in ahead of her. He was done up as a pageboy, in dicky bow and waistcoat. Elsie waved and hurried over, suddenly glad to feel surrounded by people she knew.
Andy knew Mark and Mark’s tattoos from the gym. In the town centre there was a gym up the ramp, above Red Spot supermarket, and at the start of November it had become the place where Andy took control of his life. Inside it smelled of furniture polish and coffee and a not unpleasant tang of sweat. MTV played on thirteen tellies suspended from the ceiling and there was always this stilted pidgin English booming out between songs. In Completely Fit, the clientele consisted of unemployed young blokes, middle-aged women and professional people on dinner hours. They chatted and laughed and helped each other. Andy would have been shamed in a trendier or more competitive place, but here he slipped right into a work-out plan. Every morning, at eleven, he would wind down gently in the sauna in the basement, round the back of Red Spot’s multistorey car park. At first it felt bizarre, sitting naked in a wooden shed, when just through the wall there were Cortinas and Capris jostling for free spaces. But he let the sharp heat and that funny, biscuity scent of the sauna soothe away his mid-morning anxieties. His complexion was marvellous these days.
Mark started at the gym just after Andy and it was here they first spoke, as if the intense, often boastful camaraderie of the gym was more convenient for conversation than their street. One morning Mark appeared to have trouble coordinating himself on the free weights. Andy stepped in and, in imitation of everyone else at Completely Fit, couldn’t wait to offer advice. Everyone had their own little hints on how to do things right. Passing them on gave Andy a frisson, but Mark just lay on the padded bench, looking as if he wanted to laugh.
It was a bitterly cold December. It took half an hour to warm up for work-outs and longer again to cool down to go out. Andy lay in the sauna, thawing himself out gently, letting the spiced heat insinuate itself. The first time Mark joined him in the small, dimly lit cabin, Andy sat up in surprise and shuffled along to give him space.
“We’re like battery hens,” Mark said, sitting down.
They talked and Andy stared and stared. He had trained himself not to look too hard at the men’s bodies. Yet the sight of Mark drew him in. Mark sat with his hands squashed under his thighs, kicking his legs against the wooden slats, chatting away. He sat like a kid in a boring school assembly, Andy thought.
He talked about his daughter Sally, who was in her first year at the juniors now. She had just been given her first biro and her first read-it-yourself book. Sally had been affronted: she’d spent the summer reading all of Edith Nesbit’s books by herself. Mark complained about his lodger, who had done a moonlight flit in November; about his ex-wife and her policeman lover; and about his mother-in-law Peggy, who worried too much about his wellbeing. He moaned about these things in a funny, self-deprecating way. It was as if he was saying to Andy, Look, my life is a sitcom. Just listen to this! In August, he explained, in a car stalled at a garage on the way to Darlington, with the smell of petrol almost making him pass out, he single-handedly had to deliver his ex-wife’s new baby by another man. Sam lay in the back of the car in the Texaco forecourt and yelled her lungs out at him. Why had he let her get knocked up by some copper? Listen to this, Mark said in the sauna, laughing at himself and telling the whole ridiculous story to Andy.
As he listened, Andy found himself staring at individual pieces of Mark’s overall design. A Victorian clockface spanned a good third of his chest, the hands branching from the left nipple, which looked hard in the sauna’s heat. Andy focused
