TWO

       An inspired puff of air

      I meet Lisa for Box-a-fit at midday. It will clear my head before this afternoon. Unless there is a natural disaster I always see my therapist on a Monday at three. I have known my two closest friends, Lisa and Anna, for over twenty years – we practised Bucks Fizz dance routines in the playground together at eight, and attended Duke of Edinburgh sessions as a teenage triumvirate, if only to go to the discos, and not the hikes.

      Lisa is married now, of course, as is Anna. They both settled down aged twenty-five with university boyfriends, who had quickly replaced sixth form boyfriends in the girls’ freshman year. Anna isn’t a member of this gym, or any gym now, as far as I am aware. She is still trying to breast-feed her first child, Jacob, who is eleven weeks old. Both Anna and Lisa have failed to recognise me on a number of occasions when we have agreed to meet outside tube stations or cinemas. They are used to seeing the old me.

      Anna says, ‘You don’t even look like you any more, Sunny. Even your smile isn’t as wide …’

      Lisa strides towards me confidently as I wait outside the gym, her long blonde curls swinging naturally down her back, pulled off her face with two clips at the sides. She has a slight fluffy hair halo, because she doesn’t use any product on her hair. She never has. Natural is Lisa’s defining characteristic. Her broad face is clean and shiny. I can see a couple of tiny red veins on otherwise smooth cheeks, and she has the finest of lines playing with the corners of her eyes. She does, however, have a large angry swollen spot on her chin that glares at me menacingly as she gets closer. Lisa has never worn make-up during the day, and even on a big night out she will apply one lick of mascara to each set of eyelashes, and a hastily slicked streak of lipstick to each lip. I always admired how she looked so healthy and clean, but now I wonder whether a dab of Touche Éclat here and there would be such a sin.

      Lisa ran everything, from the 100 metres to cross country when we were at school, and she is still super fit, of course – naturally fitter than I am. But that would only show in a half-marathon, not in a class like today’s, with just over an hour’s worth of fitness needed. You wouldn’t be able to tell, if you glanced through the window to the fitness studio on a tour of the gym, that she had been in training her whole life, and I had been in training for just over a year. Lisa’s husband, Gregory Nathan, is a very slim man who was the 5,000 metre steeplechase champion at her university. When he laughs I think he looks like a dog. He works in the City now. He is some kind of underwriter, big in insurance, apparently. Big enough that Lisa was able to give up her job in publishing eight months ago, to really think about what she wanted to do, and hasn’t decided yet. She keeps threatening to open a boutique of ‘lovely knick-knacks, candles, and linen, and cushions, and beautiful glass vases’, but hasn’t quite managed to bother just yet. Thankfully for the lovely knick-knack market, one hundred other shops selling exactly that have opened in that time in and around West London. Lisa and Gregory live in Richmond, and they run by the river, together, every Saturday and Sunday morning.

      Lisa was the first person to realise I was losing weight, when I had officially shed one stone and four pounds, and she was the first person to notice that I had changed my eating habits. We met for brunch one Saturday, to have a girls’ catch-up, and I ordered a tuna salad with red onions and walnuts, instead of a burger and chips with coleslaw. Anna hadn’t realised, but Lisa came right out with it.

      ‘Are you having salad, Sunny?’

      ‘I just fancied something green,’ I said with an innocent smile. I wasn’t ready to get into it with them, and at that point was unsure whether I would even be able to see it through. One stone down but eight more to go didn’t feel like something to shout about. Plus the first stone had fallen off, but now the reduction was slowing up. I realised that I was going to have to do something drastic, and join a gym, and the thought scared me. Not because I wasn’t any good at sport, but because I thought I would look like the worst kind of deluded fool, in my billowing T-shirt and tracksuit trousers, walking on a running machine, red-faced and out of puff. Now, if I see anybody even close to my old size in the gym I try and give them a big smile, if they will meet my eye, but invariably they don’t.

      ‘But you look like you’ve lost weight, in your face.’ Lisa eyed me with a smile, trying to get me to admit it.

      ‘Diet?’ Anna asked, picking up a piece of bread and soaking it in olive oil.

      ‘Kind of,’ I said with a small grin, admitting that maybe I was a little pleased with myself. ‘But more of a health kick, than a diet. I’m just trying to think about what I’m eating,’ I said, adjusting the napkin in my lap.

      ‘God, who can be bothered? I never thought it worried you!’ Anna said, staring at me intently, trying to get me to admit a lifetime’s worth of bad feeling to her soberly and over a casual lunch.

      ‘Of course it bothers me, a little bit. I just want to be healthy,’ I said, and then I was embarrassed.

      ‘Are you doing any exercise?’ Lisa asked with a smile, interested.

      ‘I’ve been walking a lot, but I think I might need to join a gym,’ I grimaced, as excitement swept Lisa’s face.

      ‘Join mine! Then I can help. It’ll be fun!’

      ‘OK, maybe, but I’m not ready for anything too major. It’s been a long time since I have done any real exercise. I have to work my way up to it …’

      Lisa mouthed, ‘It’ll be great’ across the table, and toasted her glass of lime and soda in my direction.

      ‘Do you remember that cabbage diet you went on in sixth form, Sunny, the one that made you fart constantly?’ Anna burst out laughing, and turned to Lisa. ‘Do you remember, Lisa, when we got into your dad’s car that time he picked us up from the cinema, we’d just seen Ghost, and just as Sunny sat down there was that really long farting noise! And then the car smelt so bad your dad had to wind the window down, and nobody said anything, because nobody knew what to say!’ Anna laughed so hard she knocked over her drink.

      ‘And do you remember the Slimfast?’ Lisa said, with a broad smile. ‘How much weight did you put on that week, Sunny? It was nearly ten pounds, wasn’t it?’ Lisa snuffled with laughter, little snorts escaping from her nose.

      ‘I read the instructions wrong,’ I said, trying to smile convincingly.

      ‘Didn’t you think you had to drink a shake with each meal?’ Lisa said, collapsing into laughter. ‘Poor Sunny, you know I don’t mean it like that,’ she said, wiping the tears from her eyes.

      I nodded but I couldn’t say anything.

      ‘And that time … that time …’ Anna could barely get the words out she was laughing so much, ‘that you decided you were going to wear ankle weights everywhere,’ giggle giggle, ‘to tone up your legs,’ laughing harder, ‘and you wore them to college, and by the end of the day you couldn’t even lift your feet up, and you had to take them off …’ Anna lost control and laughed for twenty seconds, as she held her sides and tried to breathe, ‘but you still couldn’t lift your legs, and you couldn’t even step up onto the bus, and you had to shuffle … had to shuffle …’ Anna started losing it again, ‘shuffle all the way home! Not lifting your feet off the ground!’

      Both Anna and Lisa were wiping their eyes, caught in the middle of a laughter downpour, drenched in it, and exhausted. Ten minutes after that they were able to order lunch.

      Lisa was so enthusiastic about the gym I almost didn’t join. Her obsession with fitness had always been so alien to me. I just could not understand what pleasure she could derive from running at 6 a.m. in the rain, as opposed to, say,