[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?

the one being courted. “Oh, he’s...” Think! Elsie snapped at herself. “He’ll be at the gym, this time of day.” It was early afternoon, exactly the time that Craig and the lads would be doing weights in that place up the ramp, above the precinct. These days Elsie could be a little more certain about Craig’s whereabouts. All his movements and routines she found herself suddenly, wonderfully, privy to once more. This gave her a glow of pleasure too, that she was able to tell Penny without doubt where he was when she needed him. She felt she had got him back. As if he had been away, or ill, or living abroad, and then something went wrong — as it always did when you tried to break away from things — and here he was, returned to his mam. He was back in his room at Phoenix Court. Only last night they had enjoyed a full evening together watching telly, Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea, then helping each other take down the Christmas decorations. Almost wordlessly and working in complete, relaxed accord, mother and son had unhooked, refolded and boxed away the streamers and festoons of tinsel. They popped globes of painted glass into their yellowing cardboard boxes. Craig said, “Mam, they were mince Crispy Pancakes we had.”

“So?” she asked, ravelling up yards of fuchsia tinsel. She realised. “Shit! We’re both vegetarians now, aren’t we?”

That was a new thing too, as of the New Year. They were back together in the house, with no sign of Craig’s rough friends or her Tom acting mad about the place, and they had both given up eating meat. Mind, meat was everywhere, as Elsie was just finding out. On morning telly they were telling you it was in all sorts you never suspected. Fruit pastilles! Cheese! Polos! She couldn’t even bite Sellotape without thinking it was made from the skin of fish. When she used Sellotape at work she cut it deliberately with scissors. And the thought came to her: We live in a world made of meat! Which made her shudder. She remembered being told at school about Nazis making lampshades out of people and at the time she thought, What a thing to teach kids! She told her mam after school and her mam said, “What a thing to teach kids!” Elsie looked around, thinking, You don’t know what the world is made out of.

Penny was saying, “Will they mind if I just go stomping into the gym? Don’t you have to be a member?”

Distractedly Elsie said, “I don’t think so, pet. People are glad of people calling in. Any time of day.” Yet really she had no idea. She was talking from her own experience of shop work. She had no idea of the clunk and grind of the gym, its grim camaraderie, its seclusion from the world.

When Craig worked out in the gym, all he heard of the outside world was the voices of his mates, MTV thumping out of sets above his head and, floating up from the precinct below, the chirpy, repetitive jingle of the Mr Blobby kiddies’ ride outside Red Spot.

In the small changing rooms downstairs, all it takes is one

person who stinks to come in and it’s awful. Everyone gets in and out fast anyway. You don’t hang around. Though I have a sauna on Sunday mornings. It opens all your pores, Mary says, she’s the manageress, and it lets the badness out. The steam is so good for you. What does it do? Tighten or loosen your skin? One of those things. I do that on Sunday mornings and every day, otherwise I concentrate on what’s underneath the skin. I work on the muscle, on making it all muscle, all that potential fat.

You have to isolate, Mary says, the manageress says. To make it work you have to isolate the bit you want to work on. She knows all about it, so I listen to her. The other lads would never listen. She tries to tell them, they laugh her off, she’s a canny lass and wouldn’t show them up by knowing much more than them. She knows when to leave well alone.

She slinks about the place in her shiny leotard thing. The crotch goes right up her bum when she’s working out and she wears it all day. We usually have a laugh about that, though I hope she doesn’t know what we’re laughing at. I think she’d be mortified. She works all day doing demonstrations on the gym equipment for the women, the lads who come in by themselves, and the older fellers. Anyone who will listen. Our lot wouldn’t take instruction, they know it all, and get on with it.

Like the Justice League of America, training on their satellite in space.

I listen, mind, to what Mary has to say and I think I benefit by it. I’ve come on better, stronger and more developed than the other lads. Just recently they’ve been commenting on it. I get those funny, rough compliments we make to each other: “Eh, Craig, man, your legs are getting massive” or “That’s some chest you’re getting on you.”

I do my workout like a routine now, that’s what it is, not much talking. The others take the piss a bit because I won’t go messing on with them, but what’s the point in that? We’re paying for this. It’s not just a social thing. In the back pocket of my shorts I’ve got my workout card that Mary made out for me. She did a list of fifteen different exercises in order and each, she promised, isolates and works on a different portion of my body. Put together, a full rotation of the exercises makes a comprehensive plan. An all-over body plan. She tailored it for me, even allowing for the slight weakness in my right leg. After the name of each of the fifteen exercises it says X20 and they’re how many reps I have