Fat Chance (10 page)

So for the next ten minutes of my life I stare at her
narrow
spandex-clad arse as I stumble my way around the rest of the park, huffing and puffing so loudly that the three little pigs would take cover in the nearest nuclear bunker if they were in earshot.

By the time we’ve done a complete circuit and ended up back at the bench on the hill I am absolutely broken. But I’ve also proven that I am not a poof, wuss, fairy, or blouse.

I collapse onto the grass and look up at the cloudless blue sky. I also try to keep the strange high-pitched whine out of my voice every time I breathe out.

‘Right then!’ Alice bellows at me. ‘That was a good warm-up. Now we can get on with the exercise program.’

I laugh hoarsely. ‘That’s funny Alice. Very funny.’

She looks perplexed. ‘What’s funny?’

‘The joke you just said about doing more exercise today.’

‘I’m not joking.’ The hands have gone back on the hips. The tone of voice has darkened. The bulgy eyes have become exponentially more bulginous.

I sit up and pull myself onto the bench. ‘You . . . you can’t be serious? I can’t do any more today.’

Now Alice crosses her arms. ‘Look Greg. You can have this two ways. You can either work with me, lose weight, and win that competition . . . or you can cry and squinny like a big fat baby and not win. The choice is yours.’

Great. She’s moved on from comparing me to the homosexual members of our community and is now accusing me of being a squalling newborn. This is much worse.

‘But I really don’t think I can do any more,’ I squinny.

‘Of course you can. You’re just not used to pushing yourself. It’s what you’re going to have to do if you want to shift all that whale blubber.’

Gays, babies, whales. Check. We’ve just about covered all the obvious comparison points now, other than maybe pigs.

‘You really think I can do it?’

‘Yes, of course I do. But only if you let me do my job and motivate you properly. It’s the only way we get things done in t
he A
rmy.’

Unbelievably, I find myself coming to my shaky feet and
looking
Alice square in the bulgy eyes. ‘Okay, let’s do it,’ I tell her.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yeah!’ I try to remember all those war films I’d seen. ‘Er . . . sir,
yes sir
!’

Alice claps her hands together. ‘Excellent!’ She smiles.

I smile too.

The smile drops off her face.

I’m suddenly terrified.

‘Drop and do twenty push-ups right now,’ she orders in a low, rather menacing tone.

‘What?’

‘Are you fucking deaf, you big pig? I said drop and do twenty push-ups, you loathsome sack of shit!’ Alice imperiously points one finger at the ground in front of her.

‘Okay,’ I reply in a thin, reedy voice.

‘What did you say, dickhead?’

‘I said okay?’

‘Say it like you mean it, Milton!’

‘OKAY!’

‘GOOD! GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES, BOY!’

I do as I’m told, prostrating myself in front of this lunatic with her bulbous eyes.

‘And ONE!’ she screeches, the sound of her high-pitched bark echoing across the park like a sonic boom. Such is the power of her voice my limbs immediately respond long before my brain has chance to tell them what to do. I’ve done one press-up before I’m fully aware of what’s going on.

‘And TWO!’ Alice shouts.

A couple of children fall off the swings over in the play area.

‘And THREE!’

Two dozen car alarms go off in the car park to our left.

‘And FOUR!’

Several birds fall from the sky twitching.

‘And FIVE!’

I feel my bladder loosen—though I can’t be sure if this is down to it resonating with Alice’s commands, or just because my vital organs are starting to malfunction due to extreme fatigue.

‘And SIX! . . . I said SIX! . . . Greg?! Greg?! I said SIX!’

‘I fucking heard you the first time!’ I wail. ‘I’m trying!’

‘Try harder! And SIX!’

‘My arms don’t work any more!’

‘Bollocks! And SIX!’

‘Stop screaming “six”! I feel like I’m watching the Hulk play cricket!’

‘I’ll stop screaming “six” when you give me another press-up!’ Alice takes in a deep breath. ‘And SIX!’

Somehow, my trembling arms manage to push me back up again. I maintain the position for a good three seconds before all the air goes out of me and I collapse.

‘And SEVEN!’

‘Oh, do fuck off,’ I say with a mouthful of grass.

The hands go back on the hips and the eyes bulge at their very bulgiest. ‘That’s it, is it? Six press-ups?’

‘It would appear so, yes.’

‘I thought you used to play rugby.’

‘I used to fit into a pair of size thirty-two jeans as well.’

Alice gives me a look of utter disgust. ‘I got the impression from your email that you’d be fitter than this.’

‘I may not have realised the depths of my unhealthiness.’

‘I should say so.’ She sits on the bench. ‘Let’s take a five-minute break and see where we’re at after that.’

‘That sounds like heaven.’

I slowly edge myself up once more onto the bench and hang my head.

I knew I was pretty unfit, but this is frankly ridiculous. I had no idea things had got this bad over the past few years.

It’s amazing how your mind can play tricks on you . . . and
convince
you of things that are patently false. These twenty minutes of hell have well and truly opened my eyes to the size of the task ahead of me.

I say as much to Alice.

‘You’re not alone. The number of clients I have who come to me thinking they’re in better shape than they are would astound you. That’s why I get the money up front these days. I’ve been stung too many times.’

‘Fair enough.’

She smiles at me. ‘I tell you what, though. If you just want to pay me for what little we’ve done today, we’ll call it quits on the rest of the week. I don’t want to put you through more than you’re capable of doing.’

This sounds like a fantastic idea. My aching bones and muscles agree wholeheartedly.

But where would it leave me? How the hell am I supposed to help Zoe win the fifty grand if I give up so quickly?

I’ll never get another blow job for as long as I live!

‘No. I don’t want to quit.’ I give Alice a sheepish look. ‘But maybe we could take it a bit easier?’ My head swims. ‘And stop for today at least?’

‘Sure. No problem, Greg.’ Alice is genuinely pleased that I haven’t taken her up on the offer. I’m sure this is mainly due to the fact that she gets to keep my money, but I bet it can get quite disheartening when people keep quitting on you all the time. I’ve probably surprised her a bit.

‘Shall we meet here tomorrow when I get out of work at half five?’ I ask her.

Alice grins and whacks me on the knee. This hurts more than I care to show. ‘Excellent! I’ll look forward to it.’ Her expression of delight falls away at the speed of light in a way that I’m already becoming familiar with. ‘But for now you can get off your arse and do some warm-down exercises, you lazy bastard.’

It’s like I’m being trained by someone suffering from severe bipolar disorder.

Still, I feel quite proud of myself for sticking with it, and as I walk home (alright, limp home) a short time later I can’t help thinking what a brave little soldier I am.

Did I say brave little soldier? What I mean is
colossal fucking idiot.

I could have just quit. Could have gone home that day and considered easier, less painful ways to lose weight.

But
oh no
, I had to take the macho route, didn’t I?

Had to
prove myself
to Alice.

I feel like I’ve had every single muscle in my body removed via painful surgery and replaced with porridge.

Alice Pithering’s idea of ‘taking it a bit easier’ is obviously very different from mine.

I was expecting to join her in the park the next day after to work to take part in some gentle calisthenics, with maybe a bit of light jogging thrown in for good measure.

If anything, though, it’s worse than Sunday.

We did the bloody circuit of the park again, this time followed by squat thrusts, star jumps, and various other hideous aerobic activities that can surely only be enjoyed by people who go in for extreme sadomasochism at the weekends.

Alice is obviously a bloody good trainer though, as she always manages to keep the routine at a level that never gets too difficult and causes me to stop. It’s always just the right side of debilitating.

Sadly, it’s not the right side of humiliating, distressing, and
agonising
.

This hideous process is inflicted on my poor wobbly body all week long. My life consists of two daily hours of hell, and
twenty-two
hours trying to recover from it. I can barely concentrate on anything at work thanks to the constant state of agony I’m in, and Zoe has problems getting more than one or two sentences out of me before I slope off to bed and sleep like the recently deceased.

Miss Pithering’s years in the armed forces are readily apparent thanks to the litany of foul-mouthed abuse I’m subjected to during the week-long course. It acts as a charming accompaniment to the physical torment I’m being put through.

It’s one thing to struggle to do your twentieth star jump; it’s quite another to have a small bulgy-eyed woman questioning your
parentage
while you’re doing it.

I’m sure I’ve seen at least three people hurry by us sketching the sign of the cross and speed-dialling 999.

‘Did your mother have any children that lived?’ Alice screams at me as I struggle to finish my star jump by leaping a scant
two inches
into the air.

‘I don’t know! Did yours have any that weren’t pure evil?’ I retort breathlessly.

‘Don’t be a smart-arse, you chubby twonk!’

This is another disconcerting aspect of Alice’s ‘motivational’ style of command. She has a never-ending supply of ways to describe me through the medium of my body fat.

In the past few days I’ve been lard-arse, jelly-tits, jiggle-puffs, porks-a-lot, the gutmeister, flabbington, Jabba, wide-load, Nelly the Elephant—and most bizarrely, Captain Love Handles.

I thought she’d run out of insults mid-week but by first thing Saturday morning she’s still going strong.

‘Come on Mr Plump! Get those legs up!’

Mr Plump does indeed try his hardest to get those legs up, but he’s now had a week of this constant torture and while the mind may still be willing, the body has finally decided it’s had quite enough of this shit for one lifetime. It wants to do nothing more than lie in a dark room and force tears of shame from my eyes until sweet unconsciousness overtakes me.

There was a time in the dim and distant past when this kind of regular exercise was something I enjoyed—but I was young, healthy, and blessed with a brain completely devoid of rational thought.

The darkened room may beckon me, but I still have a weigh-in to do over at Stream FM this morning. The loving, healing embrace of sleep is a good sixteen hours away at least.

‘Come on you horrible little toad! Another two minutes!’

‘I can’t!’

‘You can!’

‘No I can’t!’

‘Yes you can!’

‘I can’t!’

Arguing over whether I can jog on the spot for a further two minutes actually gets me to the end of those two minutes more or less intact.

‘Well done!’ Alice screeches and stops her watch. ‘There’s no way you could have done that on Sunday.’

‘Possibly. But I could walk with no pain and blink without wincing on Sunday too, so I’m not sure the trade-off was worth it.’

‘It will be when you get on those scales later,’ Alice replies with a conviction I’m not sure I can get behind.

‘Let’s hope so. If I’ve put on weight I may kill myself.’

‘Just to be on the safe side, why don’t you give me fifty star jumps one last time?’

‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’ I lift up one arm. ‘You see how much that’s shaking, don’t you? I look like I have early-onset
Parkinson’s
.’

Alice sighs and looks across the park. She turns back to me and shakes her head. ‘You know, if you’d have put as much effort into exercising over the years as you’ve done making excuses
not
to exercise, you probably wouldn’t be in this state.’

I try to respond with a witty retort, but am stymied by the very annoying fact that Alice is absolutely right. I
have
spent years making excuses not to make an effort to stay fit, and so I find myself vastly overweight, unhealthy, and generally unhappy with my lot. I think back on all those times I didn’t go to rugby training because it was too cold, too hot, too dark, on at the same time as the football, on at the same time as lunch . . . and so on.