“I think we’re naturally lazy. We all need some discipline. You can do that for each other.” Craig nodded at a couple using free weights nearby. The older, bigger man stood poised over the one lying down, ready to pull the load away from him if it proved too heavy. He yelled, “Go on, lad!” into his face.
Craig called everything he did on machines his ‘reps’. As Andy followed him about Craig hardly dropped his conversational stride and he didn’t seem out of breath either.
“I always thought my stepfather was Dr Octopus,” he told Andy. He lay on his back in a crouching position, pushing weights up a slide and bringing them down with a regular, satisfying clunking noise. “My mam’s feller, Tom. I thought he was Dr Octopus. Do you remember him? Spiderman’s deadliest enemy?”
Andy nodded absently. He stared at Craig’s weak leg, held in place by the machine. In that grip, clamped upside down, it looked almost normal. Andy knew, though, that the stronger leg was doing all the work. On that leg the muscles bunched and tensed twice as big.
Craig was on about comics again. A week ago Andy had made the mistake of mentioning that, as a boy, he read Marvel comics. Craig’s eyes lit up. This bonded them, Penny said, and she listened, laughing, to the pair of them reminiscing about the X-Men and Marvel Two-in-One. Soon she became bored and started to mock their enthusiasm. They were talking about the Incredible Hulk and how sad that story always seemed. Andy had noticed Penny’s boredom and tried to change the subject. Every few minutes after that Craig would remember something else to remind Andy of. “Did you read that one when all the Avengers were killed off in one issue?” or “The story when the Goblin threw Gwen Stacey into the Hudson River and Spiderman was powerless to save her?”
At the end of the night Penny said to Andy, “Well, you’ve made a friend there.” Andy rolled his eyes. But Penny was pleased they had found something to talk about. The night before, Craig had been fretting. She woke to find him staring at the ceiling. “What do I talk to a queer bloke about?”
She laughed at him. “Anything you want. He doesn’t talk a different language.”
To Craig, though, that was exactly what Andy did. As Penny went back to sleep, he stared at her hair mussed up on the pillow. Imagine not wanting her. It was seeing the world a completely different way. Yet they must have something in common, despite that. Craig made himself imagine not wanting Penny. Hating things about her. Thinking that he didn’t want her breasts or want to push himself easily inside her. He made himself think about fancying men. Captain America. All those superhero bodies were the same: toned-up muscles, small nipples, everything on show as they flew through the air. There was no mystery in a man’s body. It was all up and down. But that was just men’s bodies, that’s what they looked like, that’s what they were. At one level Craig couldn’t see what the fuss was about. That’s what I am, he thought and stared at Penny again. Look at her, he thought. She could talk about anything. It knocked Craig sick to think he would seem daft to Penny’s friends. They’d think he was thick and boring. It was his mam’s fault, not pushing him on to be clever, to better himself. Steve and the other lads, the company he kept, they made him stupid too. But look! Now Andy was interested in what he said about comics. They had shared all this past, all these adventures. He wondered if Andy had kept his back issues.
Craig was taking a big chance here. I must think Andy’s friendship is worth it, he thought. And Penny. I must be doing it all for her. Because here he was, hanging around the gym with an obvious queer. It was such a risk. He had been the one to suggest they work together. Andy looked pleased. What would happen when the other lads came in and saw them together? What would be said?
Andy was on the machine now, watching as Craig set the load much lower. He tensed himself, ready to start. Craig looked at Andy’s too clean, neatly ironed black T-shirt and orange gym shorts. He thought Andy was all right really. They hadn’t said anything pointing out the difference between them, but it was there all the same. As if Andy had a funny accent. He hadn’t said anything puffy yet. What would Craig do then? For friends, he supposed, you had to grin and bear it.
“Do you remember,” he said, “the story in the old Spiderman comic when Dr Octopus discovered his secret identity?”
Andy gritted his teeth, hissing out breath, exhausted already. “Not sure.”
“He found out that Spidey was really Peter Parker and that his auntie was this sick old woman. Dr Octopus pretended to be Auntie May’s real doctor, who would cure all her ailments. He came to her front door, rang the bell. He had hidden his six extra metal arms inside his overcoat.”
Andy said, “Maybe I remember.”
“It was fantastic. Spidey was away fighting the Green Goblin and by the time he came back home he found that Auntie May was getting married to Dr Octopus. How could he tell his auntie her fancy man was evil? If he did, he’d give away his secret identity.”
Andy said, “I think I read that.”
Craig nodded. “I forget what happened at the end. I remember wondering, did Auntie May have to go to bed with Dr Octopus? Would she see his other arms?”
Later, Andy went downstairs to shower first. They had between them a tacit understanding about not seeing the other naked, as if they weren’t quite of the same gender. Andy stood aching in the shower cubicle, his head against the tiles. He felt closed in,
