On My Knees by Tristram La Roche Page A

ubiquitous in London at the time. Why anyone would locate a café on the same floor as the changing rooms was beyond me. I glanced at the bar area and saw no one. Quiet tonight. Even the hum of the treadmills on the floor above was muted. At least I’d be able to get one without waiting.
    The changing room looked like the zookeeper had taken the chimpanzees there for a day out—towels strewn everywhere and empty deodorant cans scattered like pins in a bowling alley. I cleared a space on one of the benches and swapped my suit for my gym gear.
    I was glad the changing room was empty. This was the first gym I’d ever been to. The first time since school that I’d found myself changing with other men. I’d been a bit surprised how uninhibited most of them were, but I decided it was just me being weird again. When one of them sat naked on the steps of the sauna in front of me, an old doubt resurfaced. I couldn’t take my eyes off his cock as it hung down and touched the step below. So that’s what they meant by a baby’s arm. I’d left the sauna with a hard on. It bothered me. It was no more than a doubt, yet it gnawed at me constantly, like a hamster chewing on the bars to get out. Since then, I’d tried to avert my eyes in the locker room.
    The walls of the warm-up area were mirrored floor to ceiling. The floor was covered with rubberized mats, which, if you got your nose close to them, smelled like what I imagined fish sweat might be. I set about my stretches with little enthusiasm, stopping every now and then to look at myself in the mirror. How did I ever get like this? Three Prozac a day and as many bottles of wine. I’d read that New Yorkers took Prozac as a happy pill. If it had any effect on me, it just stopped me getting even worse. So I drank to be happy. The oldest cure in the book. It had worked for Churchill when his ‘black dog’ of depression was at his heels, had it not?
    So why was I so damned miserable? The reasons stared me in the face.
    There was, I had concluded, something terribly wrong with me.
    I used to be handsome, in a boyish sort of way. They said that being married made you fat, wife’s home cooking and all that. In my case this was not possible. Diana’s food wouldn’t entice a starving vagrant to cross the road. My only hope was to stick to my routine and try to shed some pounds.
    Mirrors. They were on the wall at the end of the exercise room, too, so that you could watch the contortions on your face while you pounded away on the treadmills and elliptical trainers. It also meant that you could watch your fellow sufferers at the same time. Tonight, there was only one other person there, four machines to my left and running at full pelt. He was tall with a square jaw and big dark eyes. He saw me looking at him and his eyes brightened. I looked away, pretending I’d not seen him.
    The timer on the treadmill saved me, its piercing alarm announcing that my time was up. I grabbed my towel off the handrail and proceeded to the weights. Not that I was there to build muscle, but the guy who did my induction when I first joined said I needed to tone what I had. Ten minutes later and I was back in the changing room, peeling off the sodden shorts and squeezing myself into swimming trunks.
    One good thing about the NW3 Health Club was the swimming pool. It wasn’t much bigger than the pool we’d had at home when I was in my teens, but it was stylish and clean. Above all, it was a great way to relax after the strain of the machines and weights. When you had it all to yourself, it could have been the Mediterranean.
    I always did twenty lengths. I’d just counted the seventeenth when I heard the door click. As I swam back towards the shallow end the figure standing on the steps became clear. The guy off the treadmill, in up to his waist and splashing his upper arms and shoulders with water. I made sure not to look in his direction as I counted eighteen to myself and turned again. Even if he set