Dan Taylor Is Giving Up On Women. Neal Doran
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probably things she said that she felt a bit foolish about afterwards too.’
‘The “you” who was babbling, “Miss Brown, the puddle was under my chair when I got here!”, and, “He’s not my dad, I meant Sir!” and, “I don’t suppose you’d take it as a compliment?”‘
Reading between the lines, I could see that the tiny hope I’d been nurturing that this could become a charming story for a future wedding, where Niamh and I served Middle Eastern canapés in ironic recognition of the time we got together, was not likely to become a reality.
I’d turned up at the gym mainly embarrassed to be speaking to Rob in person since he’d managed to jerk the olive stone from my windpipe — the stone that we’d all watched in silence for a few moments as it floated to the bottom of Niamh’s wine glass — but also kinda hoping that Niamh would have sent a message saying maybe we could try and have dinner again some other time. Perhaps with a cheeky little suggestion that we’d have to be chaperoned by a qualified first-aider. If the situation had been reversed it would be what I would have wanted to do. I think it comes from watching too much television.
We worked our way through the rest of our chest exercises silently, me focused on not having my arms wrenched from their sockets by the equipment, Rob focused on the spin-class blonde, now doing — admittedlyquitedistracting — exercises on a sit-down machine I thought was intended to tone and firm up inner thighs. Whatever its fitness benefits were, Rob was mesmerised by the enormous efforts she was taking to keep her tanned, lean legs wide open. I could see what he saw in her — a litheness you usually only saw in models in adverts for expensive sports watches. But for me, seeing someone who looked like that, I couldn’t get out of my head the thought, ‘I bet she’d look at you like you’d murdered someone if you suggested phoning for a pizza and watching MasterChef‘.
‘She could crack a man’s skull like a walnut with those legs,’ Rob mused.
‘Relax, you’re happily married,’ I reminded.
‘Define happily. And anyway, I’m allowed to objectively observe that she’s moving like she’s in a smutty music video by some anonymous dance act.’
‘What do you mean “define happily?”‘
Rob didn’t answer my question; he was miming a series of gestures to the Spin Siren pointing to her, and then at his crotch, or rather the seat it was rested on, establishing that she wanted to use the chest press next after we were finished. Getting up to go, he towelled down the seat and sneaked the weight up again, this time by another forty kilos.
‘Come on, let’s do some cardio,’ he said.
As we walked across the gym Rob stretched his arms and expanded his chest when we crossed paths with his new gym buddy. ‘Phew! Helluva way to get the blood pumping on a Sunday morning!’ he said as we passed. Sizing Rob up, she smiled back at him.
I smiled and was glad that I’d shifted the weight setting on the press to its lowest level just as we’d walked away.
Side by side on the treadmills, we began a brisk jog, which shifted down quite quickly to a slow jog. At this pace we could keep going without sounding like heavy breathing dirty phone callers — although I suspect we were being overtaken by the couple of red-faced older ladies speed-walking on the aisle next to us. Rob was uncharacteristically quiet, which for more than ten years had been the sign he was waiting for me to ask him if he had a problem. Which he would then deny before discussing in some detail.
‘So,’ I said, ‘things OK at the minute for you and Hannah?’
‘Sport, admiring a broad with an arse that could launch ships in the gym on a Sunday morning does not make for a marriage in crisis. And anyway, you’ve seen what Hannah gets like in here when the pilates guy walks by…’
‘I haven’t been to the gym with Hannah since she got told off by the manager because her staring was disrupting the rugby team’s conditioning training.’
‘Tight shorts on a big man do get her a bit primal.’
‘As if I wouldn’t normally feel awkward showering with the rugger team, being lectured by an eighteen-stone athlete about how he has a PhD in social studies and doesn’t appreciate being treated like a piece of meat by “my missus” didn’t really help.’
We jogged on for a minute or two, glancing across the silent large-screen TVs distracting people from the boredom of exercising by showing soap omnibuses, and cheap, showy ads offering to buy unwanted cheap, showy jewellery. Usually we tended to spend a lot of time looking at the financial news channel, grunting at news of the rises and falls of shares we didn’t own, and complaining about decisions by the Fed that we didn’t even begin to understand.
‘We’ve been having a few…spats lately,’ Rob dropped in.
‘Just usual stuff for us old married types. You swinging young singles probably wouldn’t understand.’
The ‘wise old marrieds’ was a regular routine for Hannah and Rob, going back to the time they scandalised us all when we were still students by getting hitched. Barely nineteen, and having only known each other for three months, they took me, and Hannah’s best friend at the time — I can’t even remember her name — to Manchester Town Hall. It was a Thursday morning in December, and we were bunking off our last lectures of our first university term. I’ve still got a photo of us arriving at the grand Victorian steps of the building, me and the bridesmaid in almost-matching duffle coats and standard-issue DMs. Rob freezing in the damp Manchester cold in his loudest lime-green bowling shirt and bluest turned-up Levi’s. Hannah was in a short scarlet charity-shop cocktail dress that was probably just a fraction too small for her, oozing second-hand glamour from her head to her knees. Below the knees she was still wearing the tartan Converse high-tops Rob had bought her at the end of their first weekend together.
In a cavernous council hall, in front of row upon row of empty polyester-covered chairs, they nervously giggled their way through a ten-minute ceremony, Hannah discreetly slapping away Rob’s hand while he tried to pinch her arse as the officious civil servant read a standard text on the solemnity of the vows they were taking. Hannah’s friend and I shuffled anxiously behind them, feeling as if any minute someone would come in and stop the whole thing, and tell us off for being naughty. But nobody came in. Rob made a surreptitious fart noise at the point when everything paused to see if there were any objections to the marriage, which sparked more suppressed giggles for a couple of minutes, but then it was done. They were married.
A council official played the CD provided by the couple to mark the close of the ceremony — ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ by REM — and Rob and Hannah snogged and danced around for three minutes while I worried about the noise in a place where people were working. Then Hannah gave the registrar a big hug to say thank you, and we went to the student union to get pissed, and show anyone we knew — and many people we didn’t — the finest alternative wedding rings that the student craft market could provide. The afternoon passed in a blur of booze and congratulations, the four of us being cheered and bought drinks by strangers. After a wedding dinner of Abdul’s kebabs we went to an end-of-term indie night for what would be the evening reception. In the few months we’d been at university, Rob and Hannah seemed to have got to know everyone and were circulating sharing their news between rushes to the dance floor for their favourite songs.
Caught up in the romance and the all-day drinking, I remember I tried to get off with Hannah’s friend — Andrea! That was her name — but spent the next three hours talking about her boyfriend back home instead. She was worried he would think she’d changed too much since she’d gone to university, now she was drinking pints, and into indie and dance music instead of the chart stuff they’d both liked when they were kids — six months ago.
At the end of the evening Hannah charmed the DJ until he played their REM song again and, through a cloud of beer-mat confetti, Rob carried her in his arms to a cab, taking them back to halls for their first night together as a married couple. Then I walked Andrea home, reassuring her that ‘her Matt’ would still