The Life of Liam Cromwell, Personal Trainer

Only years later, after some dubious therapy, did he allow himself to remember how it’d happened. Seven—Liam’d been seven, and already a football star, soon to be scouted for an academy, they said; Arsenal, he hoped. He was walking with his mum down the Queensway back home in Bletchley, holding her jittery hand. It’d been the hottest day of the year so far, not just shown on the weather forecast but making the real news. Birds were too hot to caw. They hopped about in the slush of ice from the fishmongers’ stall, rooks and jackdaws amid cod heads and off prawns. Even the trees couldn’t be arsed. Leaves didn’t move. The tarmac was melting in the sun, and would stick to your shoes like fresh bubblegum.

Now he recalled passing the tarmac hotbox—bright yellow, slapped with warning signs—still holding Mum’s hand. It was Highway Maintenance doing a repair to the brick pavers in the laziest way imaginable: filling a gap in the neat herringbone zip of brick on brick with pooling black asphalt. Heat haze above the hot tarmac seemed otherworldly, perhaps damaged in his memory. It was like water within the air.

Liam ran away from his mum. He remembered: some boys playing one-touch against a car park wall skied it, and he ran from her grip to stop the football. Already it was reflexive. Couldn’t be helped. A terrier after small prey. A footballer after a miskick.

At which point—according to the coroner’s inquest—one of the propane canisters feeding the tarmac hotbox suffered a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion (BLEVE) after prolonged exposure to proximate open flames heating the griddle of a street food burger stall. They’d parked up far too near. The liquefied propane became gas instantaneously and ruptured the steel canister as easily as an overfilled balloon bursts. In turn—according to the coroner’s inquest—the resultant fireball (between one thousand and two thousand degrees Celsius) sent forth was the size of a detached house, consuming entirely the burger stall and two adjacent stalls, knocking three vendors to the ground and shredding their clothing and leaving them with fourth-degree burns, though alive.

Meantime the shockwave and fireball hurled the tarmac hotbox several yards and fractured its metal and ceramic shell just in front of Liam’s mum—Debbie—spraying out its heated asphalt “like a fountain or oil blowout”. That’s what the inquest said. He imagined it like dark lava, covering her.

Liam missed the explosion. He felt the incredible bonfire heat, like a new sun brought out behind him at ground level, and heard the loud seething volcano-moan of the blast. But he did turn to see Mum staggering like a woman in a black veil, tar over her, her face gone, her arms and shoulders and body covered, dripping with the molten stuff, which pulled out in long stretches like black mozzarella dangling from a mouth to the surface of a pizza. Her face was submerged in the thick asphalt and if she was screaming you could not see or hear it. (He would never remember what the last words she had spoken to him’d been, but he hoped beyond hope that, as he ran for the football, she’d called: “Liam.”)

She stepped once or twice with her arms out blind in front of her. Then the leg muscles seemed to give up—according to the coroner’s inquest, they had literally burned away—and she fell. She fell and did not move again. He was there, seven, looking. Though flame and destruction were everywhere, the trees all alight with embers and the market now a shell-crater, Liam remembered that he’d felt very cold. He’d not since felt that feeling again, except in dreams, most nights.

*

What he had done, years later, was obsessively google “asphalt” and “tarmac” and “bitumen” and “Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion” and “propane canister” without accepting why. He googled “2007 Bletchley Queensway Explosion”, and memorised its Wikipedia as you would poetry.

By then, Dad’d been jailed. Because his parents couldn’t, it was Liam’s granddad who was to raise him. That meant Wolverton, an hour’s cycle to school, and the scrubland remnants of class pride, once pageantry, ales, and fetes—now garden gnomes, Nike, and iPad selfies. But it was a move from flat to terraced house, a real one: brick: Victorian; and with everything else gone that at least felt like solidity. Cow parsley, bluebells, brambles, dandelions. Lots of this stuff, growing near the rubberised fencing of the astro’, where you took throw-ins and corners. Plants Granddad would teach him.

Granddad—Liam did not once call him, except on a hospital visit together, at the reception desk, Michael—knew flowers. He knew many things, having chosen the lighter sort of life, teaching guitar at the local secondary modern, but above all he cared for plants in their curated and wilder forms. He knew how to grow irises and orchids in his greenhouse, and rhubarb and apple trees and cabbages in the garden, and he knew how to pollard and espalier and pleach, testament to seventy years loving poetry. The poetry had come first, revealing to him the worth of all flora. “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet” was his motto. As such Liam would meet his first girlfriend at his granddad’s allotment.

This was also when Liam started his habit of reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a numbing method: cram the mind so full that little else could enter. He went through dictionaries front to back and whole walls of encyclopaediae. His thoughts ran rarefied yet with little work to be put to, demanding challenge without object. This soothed things. His other method, starting later, aged thirteen, was weightlifting.

First, PureGym, to which he cycled six days a week, using a twenty-four hour membership and insomnia to the utmost. Noob gains were visible after four months of a routine of fastidious eccentricity. He looked back to it and cringed. He’d done everything: machines, compounds, cables, pull ups, chin ups, sit ups, planks, handstands, kettlebells, medicine balls, standing jumps, HIIT, rowing, running, yoga. Much of it from midnight to two a.m., and much of it alone. A PureGym so late and so empty you could take shirtless progress pics without anybody to care.

Lifting was a totalised form of focus, because it took in mental efforts (calorie counting, workout plans, physiology (brachioradialis, iliac furrows, psoas), biochemistry) and was physically something than which you could do nothing harder. The purpose, as he came to see it, was to aim for, at all times, one rung down from the impossible—and he took it as his allegory for life. However, it was obvious: you got larger, stronger, more attractive, whereas the increments of other sorts of self-improvement were vaguer fare, defined by another ten French verbs learned and two forgotten. Were you forgetting, and were you forgetting you’d forgotten? With lifting, at least, you didn’t need to think about thinking.

Liam also uploaded his first YouTube video in his early teens. It surprised him, being a simple bodyweight ab routine, by topping out in a few weeks at 1,900 views. Carl, his mate, said “That’ll all be paedos then.” But he filmed his second (pull ups vs. chin ups) and it reached 2,500. There were, he contended, probably not two-and-a-half thousand paedophiles interested in pull ups. Carl, on the swing next to him, in the park, during a peachfuzz dusk, scoffed—yet was impressed.

By sixteen then he’d firmed on it: college first, but no uni, and at eighteen he’d set himself up as a personal trainer. PTs were paid well and pulled. It was a few years after the summer Zyzz had died; a few years after the Olympics were in London; athletes had been everywhere—and what else did you expect of someone born with a little too much testosterone and an education in words and plants cobbled off a grandparent? “Not the uni type” said the Deputy Head. Well: this cat is not a dog. You might yourself be the uni type but could you fucking manage a two-plate bench?

*

He went with Granddad to the allotment often, wheeling the wheelbarrow (“Look at those feckin’ arms on yer”) with young efficiency. Granddad was of the age when his own arms were most notable for blue veins, and second for bones, third for skin, tagged and liverish, and fourth, finally, for musculature.

One day there were two women bending over weeds. Liam neared their rival allotment, begloved, holding secateurs. The first was young, his age, with Amy Winehouse looks, and already tattooed. She held a shovel in one hand. The second was old. She had short, choppy hair. Her eyes were just dark dots in a face of falling wrinkle. Two caves set behind waterfall.

Liam was literally measuring the circumference of his biceps every week now, as well as his chest and thighs and sometimes forearms. He wasn’t yet stacked but neither did he any longer resemble his Bieber-haired mates at school. And, measuring himself, he knew himself—and so knew how others knew him. The younger woman stared.

Granddad said, “Alright ladies, what’ve you got growing then?”

The older woman unstooped herself, and spoke. “You ain’t gonna ask us our names?”

“Well. What’s yer names?”

“I’m Bridg. This is Emma.”

“Emma. Bridget. How do you do. I’m Michael. This is my grandson Liam. He lives with me.”

“Good to meet yous,” Liam said, and saw how they looked at him. Emma, in particular, was unabashed to let her eyes stick. Her look caught him shiningly in the sunlight and her eyes glinted like clean hubcaps; her skin was pale.

“And as for what we’re growing, I’ll be fucked if I know.”

Granddad laughed like a dog. It shot out of him, as it rarely did. He had a gaze for Bridget like Emma’s gaze. His jaw was open, and he had spittle at his lips, and he had the bitter castellation of a broken old grin. Liam had told him smoking was no good, and here was evidence: the yellow sclerae with stressed capillaries.

Granddad said, “We can give you a hand.”

Liam wasn’t that keen to do double allotment work—mostly he came to keep his granddad company. Emma saw this in him, and helped him to resist Granddad’s decrepit gallantry by coming over to him first—itself an act of gallantry, he figured.

“I think my nan’s chirpsing your granddad,” she said

He laughed. “What the hell?” But he recognised the obvious hound manner.

“You can speak for him but I know her when she gets like that. Look in her eyes. She looks upwards, and hardly ever at you. She tries to get beneath you if you’re taller so she can look up at you. She literally thinks it makes her look like she’s some peng ting who’s still at school. She’s sixty-nine.”

“Ha.”

“Don’t “ha” sixty-nine, wasteman.” Emma spoke like she wanted to be a black girl. She was black’s opposite: blotched, freckled, reddenable, translucent. She had green in her neck where the arteries could be seen. Her hair was dyed a darker red than its usual red, and revealed itself at the roots. He’d never seen drier, more worked-over hair. Yet she was attractive.

“Never seen you two here before,” he said.

“Well I’ve never come here before. You’d’ve seen Nan but I ain’t never come with her, cos that is my policy. And I guess you’d notice me not her so you wouldn’t of known if she was here.”

“Maybe, maybe.” Everything she said to him brought out this unknown, tentative—nervous?—giggle. He’d never laughed that way.

“And you don’t go school in Wolvie.”

“No? Don’t I?”

“No, you do not.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. I moved. I don’t have parents. So I moved here with me Granddad. I’m from Bletchley.”

“Bletchley’s butters.”

“Lol. Ha ha.”

“I didn’t mean that—I didn’t meant to be rude about where you’s from.”

“You wasn’t. Weren’t.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey mate, don’t worry about it.”

“It’s shit here anyway. Have you been here long? It’s fucking boring.”

“Not too long nah.”

“I wanna get out. I’m either moving up City or else to London. That’s my plan.”

“London yeah?”

“I thought I’d be a nail technician and open my own place and you can get way more money in London. Nail technician to the stars, innit.”

“Aha. You’ve thought it all out.”

“And you? What’s your plan then?”

“I dunno. But—well, I do. I wanna be a PT. Be my own boss yeah.”

“You already look like one.”

“Yeah? Aha. How’s this?”

Somehow he had the passion of courage come to him and next he was raising both arms parallel to the earth, his elbows bent, flexing his biceps for her. As he knew from several thousand glances in the mirror and several hundred mirror selfies, to bring up the biceps emphasised your v-taper and made your t-shirt ride up, as it was now, revealing the snail-trail of adolescent brown hair he so prized for being six months ahead of his friends’.

Emma stuck her shovel into the ground and leant forward onto it, raising one foot to the step, and crossed her arms. She looked at Liam, looked away, looked back, with a sort of chewing-on-a-grass-stalk glare. Unimpressed, it seemed, or willing to be thought to look unimpressed. He thought she was ridiculous. Cat-eye makeup and dyed hair and tattoos, but leaning cross-armed on a shovel, like the old memes of the Mona Lisa in rave glasses. He put his arms down.

*

Given her character as he’d so far seen it, Liam didn’t expect Em to be a cleanfreak. Proud was how she preferred to be termed, whenever he was ribbing her. Above all else at home, she desired the colour white. Not grey, as was becoming fashionable—unrelenting white. Kitchen cupboards and bathroom ceramic. Walls, ceiling, tiled floors. Sofa, armchair, dining chairs, desk. Em forced her Nan to whiten everything. She’d taken Liam home once day and offered him a Coke—it’d fizzed up on opening, bubbling past his fingers, and dropped two splats on the tiles. “Now I’ve got to mop, godsake Liam.” But she didn’t have to mop—you’d’ve just wiped it up, wet sponge or wet wipe or towel, and it would’ve come right off the tiles. But no: Em mopped the whole room. She called him a fucking melt.

She was the girl who taught him how to finger someone. She taught him, tentatively, how to have sex, how to be gentle, explained all the parts of herself. She taught him—they were still sixteen—how to be a man, and be kind, and noble, even, when your girlfriend needed to have an abortion—how to turn up, be there, hold her hand, speak nothing critical, take her for ice cream, bring her ibuprofen, cuddle her as she cried through the night, and so on, and so on.

Why was her cleanliness so notable? Because of her personality, maybe: all slapdash, dirty jokes, last-minute rush. Em’s laugh like a 1970s comedian. Her punching way of joshing you, lowblows to the kidney or triceps, leaving you with a dead arm, punches just too hard for play. These were not attributes of a girl (who modelled herself on a dead alcoholic) for whom clean surfaces were obsessional. But they were. She had some need to erase, perhaps because her personality was so large. It didn’t want to compete—like how Granddad said pictures were best on white walls, for the sake of the contrast. Well, Liam didn’t know about that, but he’d been to the National Gallery—school trip—and’d liked the Renaissance paintings in gnarled gold frames on the walls of red and green silk, which were like London summed up.

So then their first real row was a cleanliness row. Liam was round Em’s, her parents were out, and they were having ciders and getting a takeaway. Big Brother was on. At the kitchen island they divvied up the curries (onion bhajis; prawn puri; lamb jalfrezi; butter chicken; two garlic naans) from their tupperware, filling plastic plates high, and placed them on trays. They carried them into the lounge to sit in front of the TV, balancing the trays on their knees. The sofa was white. They had cutlery on their trays and their tins of Strongbow. A contestant was sat on another’s back, riding them like a horse. The contestant said she had always wanted to be a jockey; her physique had not made it possible. The butter chicken was brick-orange and the jalfrezi waterlogged—it had dryish pieces of something Liam didn’t know, of the ilk of lemongrass. The sofa was white. Liam’d finished his cider and was reaching over to Em’s to troll her, as if he were going to drink her drink, but she batted his hand proprietorially and he hadn’t expected it and he leaned back surprised and quickly forward again to right himself and his tray toppled and the momentum of the plate’s ceramic sent it sliding downwards to the front edge of the tray, hitting the edge and upsetting it, flipping it entirely off him with the motion of a flipped coin, and his reaction was to stand up and into the curries, knocking the naan away with his thigh, cutlery flying, his empty tinnie ricocheting off into the distance, and the bright oils and oranges and browns making their peace with his trackies, with the light carpet, and with the segment of white sofa that had been between his legs.

Em’s response was to say, with angered wisdom, “Oh my fucking god you can’t get curry out of anything,” in the unconscious, gnomic speech patterns of words said under great stress. She had to take her own tray, fastidiously, and place it on the coffee table, safe; she then lifted Liam’s plate, just as you’d lift a rock and send those creatures which favour dark and mosses scuttling off from the new ultraviolet world, only finding beneath indelible curry on absorbent carpet. He’d already lifted his tray, holding it uselessly. She was already saying, Liam, Liam, fucksake, fucksake Liam, Liam I can’t fucking, Liam.

Together now they were moving and scraping and scrubbing—a pink bottle of Vanish sprayed ineffectually into jalfrezi—and Em’s shouts grew hotter. Liam wasn’t taking it. He was embarrassed to have done this, while a guest, and the masculinity in him demanded that there be reasons other than his own failing, so he hit back: “Well if you hadn’t’ve of hit me and made me jump it wouldn’t’ve happened.”

“Wouldn’t of happened, so, so now this is my fucking fault? Look at this place.”

“Well I wouldn’t have reacted so, so I wouldn’t’ve leant forward and the plate went sliding, because it put the weight on the edge of the tray.”

“I’m actually not fucking interested in the method that made this happen cos what’s happened’s happened and we’ve got to clean it up, and what’s Nan gonna say?”

“We’ll clean it but I couldn’t not do it, I couldn’t do anything else.”

She looked up from her two-handed grip on a sponge, where she’d been lathering the carpet, raking it, “You couldn’t of done nothing else? Like maybe actually not standing up and sending curry flying onto the fucking carpet? And we’ll have to get a new sofa an’ all?”

“Maybe if you’re so fucking worried about mess you shouldn’t’ve had us eating curries on a white sofa with trays on our laps to begin with?”

Fury in her now—a quivering at the temples, as when the jawbone moves. “Liam are you fucking—you’re literally taking this and placing the blame on me rather than admitting you’ve fucked up? And how is this not any different from your usual? The way you love to be above things—the way it’s me what’s always at fault and you’re just observing, cos you’ve never done anything wrong, you can never admit you’ve made mistakes, you’ve fucked up, and look at this shit. In fact, you know what, you know what Liam, can you just fuck off? Like, literally head home? And I’ll just deal with this because I can’t have you here right now. Just fuck the fuck home. I’ll see you another time.”

This was his first experience of love—he termed it that, mentally, without saying it to her, too worried he was using a big word wrong, and maybe as worried that she’d use it back—and, being his first experience of love, the argument terrified him. The welter of so many emotions, good and bad, like mixed colours and whites in the washing machine, was always going to be too much, what with his preoccupations. He wasn’t a stand-up-and-take-it sort of guy. She should’ve known him for what he was—the 10k run at midnight sort, where feelings could be put into physicality, his calculus being that a burn in the throat and lungs was fine distraction from the subtler pains. He wasn’t an arguer; and so, two ciders in him, he cycled home, reflected somewhat, then cycled to PureGym, doing deadlifts in the bleak hours when only the sorry and forgotten made use of 24/7 gyms.

*

One summer evening the following year, while Liam was filming a fitness video in the garden, his granddad came home early from the pub. He was there in the background, hands on hips, inhaling the air, strident on the smashed patio, evidently pissed. Liam only noticed him after a set of parallel bar dips, narrating for the camera.

Sunset was near—he let himself be irate. “Granddad, mate, you’ve just got in the back of the shot. Fucksake. I’m gonna have to film that again and those dips killed me.” Liam wiped chalky hands on his shorts; he was shirtless, knowing that it improved his views. He didn’t yet have the full spread of a man’s chest hair, though it was coming in, one pec faster than the other. Granddad’s own was like the spread of a white mould.

“Why can’t you get a real job then. There’s apprenticeships going all over town.” He was wearing ridiculous aviators, but his glare could be felt behind them.

“This is a real job. And at eighteen I can be a full-time PT. You don’t really get it. I’m getting two hundred quid a month from YouTube.”

“Less than my pension.”

“And?”

“Yer of working age, son. You should be getting more than a feller who’s retired.”

“I’m seventeen.”

“You should learn to drive.”

“I’m planning to. It’s expensive now. Not like in your day, Granddad.”

“There’s always an excuse.”

“This excuse is also the truth, just saying.”

One of Michael’s fingers went up behind his sunglasses to rub his eye, performing a motion in lieu of talk. This was the best you’d get in Wolverton. You could stump someone and they didn’t even need to reply—it was implicit that they believed they were correct, and there was no changing what people believed. Proof, argument, conversation: these were all too abstract in a town of people who were sick of abstractions. They cared about petrol prices and the cost of heating your home. The only success around here was success itself. A newer car. A kitchen extension.

*

They had a Halloween party for schoolfriends that autumn. Granddad said it’d be all right, just tidy the place up when done—Liam knew if Em came it would be more acceptable for him to lobby for Bridget to be there too. That’s why he wanted the party to happen. Funny how the tastes age. You fancied sixteen-year-olds at sixteen. At seventy you were into seventy. One of the boons of growing up. She was invited, and said she’d come. Em had bigged it up, he guessed, needing her Nan’s backup.

The mood was shots, mostly. Jäger, sambuca, tequila rose, apple sours, vodka, vodka, vodka. Granddad, a man who hadn’t fought at the Falklands but who had the attitude of a man who’d fought at the Falklands, was even seen with a WKD. Various faces of lupine young beauty or scrofula everywhere—zits, taped piercings, neon V-necks, the scrawn of youth, and its compensating doughy softness, of fluff-beards and fuzzy arms. Some costumes serious, some slutty—Catwomen, Batmen, skeletons and axe-wielders and zombie nurses. Bridg alone, Bridg the dinner lady, was the only female being Liam thought, push come to shove, he wouldn’t shag. And there was, of course, Em, looking dark and undead, having made herself up as Corpse Bride in jeans; and, as well as dark and undead, dark and gorgeous, dark and fit as fuck, dark and something to do with Shakespeare’s sonnets they’d been doing in their English lessons. Liam himself was Leonidas, from 300: abs out, and he’d even had the fake tan, something he’d been keen on but needed an excuse for.

“Nah, didn’t Em tell you I’m not doing college?” he said to Bridg. “I’m going on with my YouTube, which I can live on. And when I’m eighteen—just as soon as I’m eighteen—you want a shot by the way?—no? alright cool—at eighteen, two months from now, it will be possible for me to become a PT, it’s just not allowed now, not this age, they don’t let you. You must be thinking about retiring right around now, no?”

Later, he saw his granddad leaning over Bridget like a lamppost over a street. He was sending his massive bastard’s smile down over her, and she took it from him, as if he were the Marbella sun, and she ready to burn. Wherever her hands moved, Granddad’s hands moved to intercept them, half holding, half pawing. They were discussing some absolute bollocks regarding a pub which had become a Pilates studio. “This means they’ve won, you know,” he heard Granddad say. Bridget was a foolish something-or-other fifty years too late, and divorced, and alone, smiling gooeyly up into his smoker’s dentistry as though he offered all the world.

Out in the garden, someone hit someone. Dan had fallen into Jason, knocking his rollie to the damp patio tiles. Liam saw it through the French doors which Granddad insisted on closing whenever anyone smoked, though he himself smoked inside. (“My baccy’s superior.”) Jason’s sole punch landed, a hook to jaw and cheekbone, and Dan, pissed, fell into the garden fence and espaliered jasmine. But the stringy perfumed ropes of plant held him, unbroken, and even the fence took the weight. Clearly he considered the punch fair, because he got up, holding his face manfully, and rotating his jawbone as if to test it still worked. Bridg came out and nan’d them both, offering cups of tea and insisting they shake hands. It was just one of a thousand teenage incidents that night, from getting off, to posing for Snapchats, and, being just one, failed even to be a highlight—was mosaic only, a tile in the picture of youth, building up to something, but nothing in itself.

Then Em. She called Liam over and said he should help hold back her hair. “I’m gonna bob for apples.” They did have a big nautical bucket, banana-yellow, filled with cold water and seven or eight apples, though nobody had yet bothered. Was this meant to show some prowess? That she could, because she hadn’t required braces? Did she want the front of her black blouse wetted by the water? Did she just want to be touched?—her hairspray suggested the latter, because there was no way anything on that head was moving, even without his calloused hands at her neck.

“Get that one,” he said.

“I’m tryna get that one, stop.”

“Go on. Go for it. Oorah, marine, let’s fucking go.”

“Just don’t let go of my hair.”

“You’ve got it.”

Em had the apple at the end of her teeth. “I ggod id. I did id, ‘iam.”

She came up rearing, incisors hooked into appleskin. She’d gotten the only green one, and was holding it now like the centrepiece pig of a medieval banquet. Not that she was piglike—far from it, far daintier, far more a little vole or stoat or otter or other such sweet scarpering river mammal. Liam said, “oink oink,” and she let go of the apple (it hit the water, making a pompous splash), laughing at him—he folded back the tip of his nose to expose his nostrils, oinking at her. He grabbed her now, twohanded, and she squealed, and he kissed the inside of her ear and flitted his tongue in the whorl. Em giggled and moaned.

Next with a bottle of vodka in hand they were headed upstairs to his room, now impeccable, all things boxed or tidied or generally vacuumed, equally Em’s influence and YouTube’s. The red light of his filming set-up winked steadily in the otherwise dark. She was kissing him the most hotly and impassioned she ever had, and they toppled to the bed, he between her. One palm under her head, he reached to clutch her breast with the other, then hips, then down, where the plasticky netting of her costume’s skirt’s innards barely concealed her own. His finger reached there, followed soon by his face, followed soon by a readjustment to standing, as he pressed into her.

He whispered, “Wait—” and paused.

“I’m on the pill now Liam. Don’t worry.”

Well, he was glad he’d worked on his hip flexors, or it would’ve been desultory stuff. The heating was on full and the curtains were drawn and a thin glow of emanation of streetlight bordered the window. Sweating, the both of them, Em’s makeup came off clumpy and he could feel the slime of his fake tan melting.

“Don’t get anything on my clothes.”

“I’m not. God fuck yes Emma.”

She came, and it made him cum. He collapsed over her, heart beating by heart in the night. They lay in their warm mess, till she squirmed, not happy at his still being in her, nor the fact of the new, cold-growing filth, as it seemed to seem to her.

“Mate. Mate did you just cum in me again? Did you not pull out? Are you fucking joking?”

“I—Em, fuck, you said you were on the pill—I was so into it—”

“I am on the pill. I’m taking the piss.” She paused, becoming rigid under him. “You know, for a really muscular guy sometimes you don’t know how to fuck hard.”

“That’s horrible Em. Don’t say that to me, c’mon.”

“Sometimes I don’t know why you put all that effort into your body for that.”

“You’re wasted. You’re just pissed.”

“I’m honest.”

*

Smart cookies, trapped socio-geographically with those who aren’t, have a tendency to fleeing. Two things came at once: Liam, aged eighteen, decided to leave Em and move to London, and told her so. This was when he’d planned everything, and gotten a studio flat sorted in Camden (why Camden? he’d think later) and booked the moving van—he could drive now—and packed up his garden gym and all his weights and was about to leave. He needed the out in order to face her, the sense of being ready. Like those with dangerous lives who keep a prepared bag by the front door.

This was the first thing; but on the same day, after he’d broken up with her, and she’d hugged and cried and argued and pleaded, through the whole afternoon, a three-hour breakup, he cycled back home and found Granddad dead in an armchair.

A stroke, he was informed. Instantaneous, or thereabouts. Granddad had the Collins guide to garden birds slumped open in his lap, and by him was a dead cigarette which he’d seemed to’ve had the foresight and will, even in the act of his dying, to stub in his Admiral Nelson ashtray, saving the house from housefire.

*

Liam’s dad inherited the house, but Liam had to deal with the sale while he was in prison. He learned after months of helping that you can’t really trust an addict. He offered Liam nothing. He kept it all. But it turned out there were bookies’ debts, and the estate was reduced to nothing worth fighting for.

*

Bridget held the wake at her place. She kept the curtains drawn and blinds down, not fully paying heed to tradition, nor to her impulse of superstitiousness. Liam brought in aspidistra and pothos and philodendron. Michael Cromwell would not have wanted flowers. He was, foremost, a plant man. His son, Liam’s father, was denied licence to attend the funeral.

An Irish relative, a cousin of a cousin, Sláinte’d Liam with a clink of pint glass. He’d forgotten the cousin’s name already, knowing him by the sunburnt quality of his skin—not actually sunburnt, just sunburn-coloured. His little blue eyes were like blue abattoir stamps on the flesh of a pig. He’d lived in England longer than Liam’d been alive. He said:

“Yer Granda was a good man. Very diligent. A very careful man.”

“Thank you.”

“But he was a bit careless dying and leaving you all on yer own, no?”

“I don’t think he planned on dying.”

“Awh look I wasn’t meaning that. But you’ve had all the house to deal with I hear.”

“I don’t mind, honestly.”

“Affairs in order. That’s what they say. Well—all my affairs is in order. I keep ’em from the wife.”

“Charming.”

“Eh, lighten up lad. Look on your face like you’ve been to a funeral. I’m joking.”

*

A few days after Granddad’s funeral, and wake, when he’d already broken up with Em, and had his flat ready in Camden, Liam was out for a jog and ran into Bridg (dual-wielding carrier bags in which he could see Lambrini and chocolate digestives) who was stomping along the canal path. (Why the canal path, with her food shop?) She’d been good to him at the wake, so he was happy to take out his iPod headphones and give her a bit of talk.

Eventually, post-chitchat, she got to: “Look, what I said to you the other day Liam, I meant it.”

What had she said? Something about twelve or fourteen pints was making it hard to remember. But whatever heartfelt musings she’d mused, it’d be awkward to’ve forgotten. So he had to play with it. “You did? It meant a lot.”

“Of course. You’ve been like family, and Michael was like family.”

“Well, thank you.”

“So, do you want to take us up on it?”

He tried to be acrobatic. “How would it work?”

“How’d it work? You’d just move in, that’s all. The room’s all prepared. And I know with Emma things’re hard, but that’s no reason to not.”

Vaguenesses returned. Yes, to move in with her, after he’d had the house sold for Dad. Was it right to counter such generosity?—such as is expressed most deeply in the unthinking kindness of older women. Yet London was there, and anyway, he couldn’t, not with Em, could he?—live with her, after breaking up with her? You had to have some sense of honour, even nowadays.

She went on, “We know the house is sold and all that, and you’re like, you were like family, as I say.”

“It’s really so lovely of you to ask, Bridg. But—”

“No, don’t say “but”, there ain’t no need for that.”

“It’s just that I have a contract with a flat in London. And, I think, ultimately, it’d be fairer on Em to go. You wouldn’t want you heart broken and to be reminded of it every day.”

“Oh, she can get over that in no time at all, I know her, she bounces back.”

“I think I’ve got to go to London. But thank you, Bridg.”

*

Having moved in (a form of labour very different to weightlifting, involving all the accessory muscles you never worked, straining the ligaments, heating the blood) and with no friends and no plans, Liam visited his new local, The World’s End, sank nine lagers, took a girl home—or, was taken home by a girl—and woke up, drymouthed and migrainey, at approximately four a.m., alone. He’d ushered himself into London with two types of vice, and his lumbar burned where he’d been moving boxes of weights. In the moment he felt awful—but it seemed like the right welcome.

Liam did, at last, three weeks later, after two failed interviews, find a job as a PT, though not as he’d hoped. Posher than PureGym, but a lengthy commute. Not a powerlifting clientele—mostly the yoga sort, those for whom gym was not regime but routine; and therefore, he felt, pointless. He was going north every day, out of London, to the pretentious wastes of the green belt, where 1990s petrol stations met new football training grounds, isotonic therapy centres, cryo, the nation’s best state schools, and endless shit landscape. There were trees here, and birds, and everything Granddad had loved in familiar forms, but, encircled by the M25, they seemed of circus or zoo more than wilderness. Range Rovers and Bentleys. Men with filler; women who’d had it dissolved.

He got his cyan uniform and started at Camelot Fitness the day after he interviewed. Most of his work was to be classes in Studio Two (Studio One was for spin, and therefore prioritised), a mixed space of racks and cardio. He replaced another PT, Angela, who was moving on: having kids and getting away from London, taking her six-thirty a.m. slot. He’d travelled over an hour on the Tube, rising from underground to overground in powdery summer-sunrise light. And arriving at Camelot, the security guard—they had a security guard—stopped him for questioning. “Don’t recognise you.” No, Liam told him, I’m new. He wouldn’t be convinced, and the gym manager had to be brought out. Douglas said it was fine, he was new, he had a class in ten minutes and there hadn’t been time to make him a lanyard. Douglas who’d told him at interview the day before that his dream’d been to work in Formula One, but life doesn’t let things work out, does it?—and who entirely lacked even the semblance of physical fitness, looking like an unharvested tomato sunscalded on the vine.

His first class was nine women and two men, the women serious, the men not. He had them doing low reps of dumbbell work, HIIT, ropes, skipping. They were more hardened than he’d imagined, and he upped and upped it, worried they’d think him too soft. Liam knew no one by name, but one of the women introduced herself to him afterwards as Charlotte. She hadn’t sweated at all. About fifty, she looked forty. The territory between her yoga pants and sports bra revealed a slit of belly, and the belly revealed two firm abdominals. Her tan was perfect, and seemingly neither bottle nor bed.

“So do you live around here, Liam? You’re new to the gym—new to the area too?”

“No, actually. I just moved to Camden Town.”

“Ah, Camden. It was all hippies and druggies in my day. Gentrified now, I suppose.”

“Getting that way, looks like.”

“Well, welcome. We’re a friendly lot here. But we focus meticulously on our health. Just—well, you might want to think about going in for a little more intensity. That’s only a piece of advice.”

Was it flirting? He hadn’t been flirted with in an oblique way before. Em, Em’s friends, had always been straightforward. Or was this friendliness, as shown by a woman of her age and class to a young man of his? Charlotte’s slight frenetic passion in the eyes could be read however you wanted. Ultimately the eyes told you she wasn’t to be bullshitted.

Later, in the staff area by the protein vending machines, he flicked through Tinder. Later still, at home in his studio flat, he continued working on YouTube, which had stalled at 15k subscribers and was only making him three hundred quid a month. That is, he filmed several takes of a video on pistol squat form, smiling all the while, but with nothing behind the smile. Was this life now? Commute, classes, videos, bed? Rice and chicken and shakes? Once done, he went back to The World’s End for a couple, which became a few—but he tempered himself, having to be up at five, and with nobody much taking an interest in him, this time.

*

Tinder before class; Tinder after class. He couldn’t help but think of it in terms of optimisation, metrics, regimentation. This wasn’t like what the apps were like in Wolverton. You had choices now, thousands upon thousands of them. Liam granted himself that his face wasn’t bad, was at least masculine, but he had, anyway, his physique as a cheat code here—and so, of his six Tinder pictures, he was shirtless in four.

The first date he went on was also the last date he went on, and therefore Tinder fulfilled itself, and he deleted it. He deleted it because he knew, after that first date, after meeting Tilly, there was no point, simply no point continuing to search, because he’d found, and all that was left was not to fuck it up. His heart felt glorious and giddy. At every instant, almost, he was thinking of her, or his thoughts below his thoughts were thinking of her. Worse, he had the six pictures from her Tinder (which he’d screenshotted) and the twenty-nine pictures from her Insta, thirty-five pictures total to ogle, fawn, simp for, lose sleep over. This hadn’t been the case with Em. This was illness, addiction—it was, he assumed, love.

She looked Lara Croftish, or at least the Lara Croft he recalled having his first wank to, pixels and bust, in the Tomb Raider Playstation game. Perhaps the echo explained something of her allure. Tilly had the same impossible figure: a waist your fingers could seemingly meet around, and a chest they certainly couldn’t. Yes, he was a man, and his desires were physical ones; but there was also her personality—character seemed the fit term—which he’d found compassionate, thrilling, hilarious, risqué. When the waiter spilled her glass of Shiraz into her lap, destroying her cream dress, Tilly’d had the grace to turn it into something humorous, bonding with him, defusing things, placating the apologies, and eliciting sympathy without meaning to, or needing to. She looked beautiful in that damp, reddened dress, which didn’t hold any import for being the gaffe of an underpaid kid, but only as the demonstration of her kindliness, even nobility. Yes, Liam would think on her in such a manner, and be sincere about it, too, fifty times a day.

On their second date they went to a wine bar. Her suggestion. He’d never enjoyed wine, but Tilly was the sort of companion who made whatever you were doing wonderful. Liam drank it the way you drink beer: gulping, wiping the mouth with the back of your hand. Ordering plenty.

“Are you working tomorrow? Shall we get really really drunk?” she said.

“I’m already on my way to drunk.”

“Well—when going through hell, keep going? Churchill said that, possibly apocryphally.”

“My classes aren’t till the afternoon. So I’ve got time to recover, yeah.”

“Good. That’ll be so much more fun. Let’s get a bottle. Let’s go wild. This is so fun. Don’t you think of life as a game? Things just happen. You can just jump on, decide to ride for a little while, jump off again. Life’s just there—you can take as much from it as you like. There’s so much happening—so much, always. You’re going in one direction, you can sidestep, you can change the whole thing. These waiters, they’re from Spain, they’ve lived all this life. What, where? Seville, Madrid, Valencia? Have they walked the Camino? I’m from fucking Hadley Wood. They have bullfights. We have barfights. Well. I haven’t seen one before. But you know what I mean? I’ve read about them. You create your own life. You can do anything. Let’s get really drunk. Let’s see what life has to offer? Right?”

He leaned forward. “You’re dangerous.”

“Ha. None of the guys I’ve ever dated before would speak to me like that. In a good way. You’re different.”

“You are. You really are. You’re tempting me. Temptress.”

“You’re so old fashioned for someone who’s totally not old fashioned. I’m “dangerous.” How do you look like an influencer but act like Wikipedia?”

“That’s the nicest compliment I’ve ever received.”

“I thought you said you had a girlfriend before? She never compliment you?”

Tilly didn’t know her lips were stuck with red wine, and her teeth were shaded. She looked perfect.

“She complimented me but in a very different way.”

Her eyebrows lifted up, which he thought was a move she’d practised. “What sort of a way?”

“Not an exciting way. More like I was a dog she liked.”

She laughed, a lovely laugh, but uncontrolled. “What? A dog?”

“Yeah. Like you’d say a dog is a good boy. I dunno. Just not in a mature, adult way.”

“Dog. Hm.” She paused, but then her freneticism forced her out of the silence. “Well, you were young.”

“Not young enough for it to not be weird. It weren’t that long ago.”

“If you were a dog, you’d be a pitbull.”

“A pitbull? Haha. Not necessarily a dog you’d wanna be.”

“Oh no, pitbulls are very popular.”

“Is it the hair?”

“No, you’re just a skinhead by the by. It’s the manner.”

He trailed one of his fingernails along her forearm and she shivered pleasingly. “Where are we going after this?” he said.

“Casino. Club. I don’t care. I want to really live.”

*

Next what he remembered was they were at the blackjack table. He had a stack of green and a stack of yellow chips; Tilly had two red ones. She was leaning forward towards the croupier, an ancient man with the yellow-white hair of age and spacers in his ears. Doing what, flirting with him? Liam took her wrist, not trying to grab her but to hold her. She pulled away—he stayed attached—she whipped her wrist hard so that his hand came off.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“What d’you mean what am I doing?”

“Don’t get like that with me. You wouldn’t want to piss me off Liam.”

*

He then helped her into an Uber, though she didn’t need his help. There’d been a few extortionate gin and tonics, even a shot—?—and Tilly was leaving by herself, a cab all the way to Hadley Wood. He was in Leicester Square, and it was so late it was empty, and the rain was coming down on plant leaves, and roofs, and terrible public sculpture. He waited for a bus; must’ve slept.

*

The next day he barely made it to work alive. He had to manage midday, not six-thirty, placed on the afternoon shift in a move of unconscious magnanimity by Douglas. Liam moped in the staff room on his phone, desperately chugging electrolytes and bananas.

Throughout the workout, Charlotte stared at him.

After his class, which he survived, though more sweaty and breathless than those taking part, Charlotte approached him. Her swishing arms made a polyester sound. Her look said determination. She stopped, just before him, the same height, smelling of roll-on and mint and a honey-based perfume.

“She came back totally, totally drunk,” Charlotte sneered, overenunciating. A mother’s voice, cornered. Under her eyes the bags had violet veins which reflected light, even under concealer. He sensed these tiny veins bulging, stressed, pumping.

“Sorry, who are we talking about?”

Yet he knew, didn’t he?

“Tilly.”

“Tilly?” He felt the hot rising vomit of exercise plus hangover, and just managed to suppress it. “What? Tilly? You know Tilly?”

“You aren’t allowed to see her Liam. You aren’t seeing my daughter. You’ve had the beginning, middle, and end of this. The end.”

“Tilly’s your daughter?”

“Yes of course she’s my daughter. You’re inappropriate for her. Don’t go on another of your little dates with her. The state she turned up in. Why, I’m extremely disappointed in your choices. I’d thought better.”

Liam understood, and forced himself to focus not on the coincidence but on the scene. “With respect, me and your daughter, we’re both consenting adults.” He spoke calmly, with manners.

“Stop trying to sound so reserved when you’ve dug up so much passion in me. Is what I’ve said not clear?” She crossed her arms—more scent came off her. Copper and spearmint and seawrack, he thought. The smell had the profile of a mist; you felt it should be visible. It was particulate. Liam enjoyed it guiltily.

“It is clear. I just don’t think I need to listen to you, Charlotte.”

She uncrossed her arms suddenly. Her hands went out by her sides, beseeching. “This is outrageous—”

“Actually I would say that what’s outrageous is you thinking you have the right to control me.”

“I pay you, don’t I, don’t I? Are you not an em-ploy-ee?” She spat her words. “I wouldn’t have Tilly seeing a boy who works on the reception of a hotel. Why should this be any different?”

“Look. We will probably see a lot more of each other. It’s best that—look, I think we got off on the wrong foot, and I’m willing to apologise.”

“I will certainly not be seeing any more of you. Nor you of me.”

“I mean because, dating Tilly, it’s more than likely that we’ll come across each other in life. Especially if things get serious. And, the fact I work here, and you come here.”

“No. And it isn’t that I’ll be leaving here, abandoning my routine. But I don’t think you should work here anymore. It isn’t going well, let’s be honest.”

“That’s an opinion you’re entitled to.”

“Yes, and we’ll see.” She stepped right up close to him. Their faces could’ve touched. Other than mint, other than syrup perfume and salt and deodorant, he smelt another smell: a woman’s smell, an older woman’s, like the smell of a thick stiff skirt on a hot day, like the smell of tights peeled down.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“You like my daughter, well. It makes sense that you’d like me too.”

Being hungover worsened the unreality. Taylor Swift in the background. This strong sweet beautiful smell. Few people in the gym, and nobody at their end, nobody looking. The noise of someone grunting, and the noise of a treadmill pounded by flat feet. Didn’t you always notice minor, irrelevant things in these moments of the highest sensation? The texture of the foam puzzle-pieces that made up the gym floor, a ribbed pattern—and how they were the same dimension of square as the ceiling tiles above them. There were water fountains in the gym which dispensed three temperatures of water, dispersed in cones rather than cups, and next to each of them, two monsteras in gold pots. Charlotte placed her hand on Liam’s shoulder.

“Well?” she said, eyeing him. She had the glare geese have in challenging you. Do something. Liam brought up a hand to her hand on his shoulder, meaning to bring it down, to pass her own hand back to her, declining it.

And as he did, she shouted, “Don’t you touch me. Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Get off my hand! Don’t touch my hand! He’s touching my hand!”

Gymgoers started staring—though with bathos, for all of those in noise-cancelling headphones remained unaware. Charlotte had stepped back and now her challenging look morphed into something wounded, fearful, aghast. What was she doing? What deranged game?

Douglas came over, lightly jogging. “What’s going on? Liam?”

“It’s fine,” Liam said.

“He grabbed me. He grabbed my hand. We were having a discussion—a heated discussion. And he grabbed my hand, he clutched my hand and hurt me.”

“Liam. Go to the staff room now and wait for me there.”

“You serious? The atoms of my hand barely even came into contact with the atoms of hers. Like, come on mate, be real.”

“Don’t get smart. Go.” Douglas turned to Charlotte. “Are you all right? Let’s sit down—come with me over there. Liam, you’d better go home today. Go home.”

As she left, Liam left, and they both turned back, like lovers; over her shoulder, twisting her head, she smiled at him.

*

He messaged Tilly, explaining it all, feeling he had no one else to offer explanations. She didn’t reply. She aired him the rest of the day, and he had to be up at dawn the following, and, having heard nothing from anyone, no texts or calls or emails, went back, taking the Tube, making his long walk in bitter sunshine, and entering Camelot Fitness by the automatic doors.

Already it was air-conned to deep freeze. A few treadmills and bikes going. Someone sat on their phone on a stool drinking something matcha. And Douglas (picking at his polo top like a heron grooming itself, with his few remaining hairs troubled and zigzagging away from him) rushed over.

“Liam. Come into the staff room now.” He was shouting his whispers. “Come on. We can’t have anyone seeing you. In there, now, go.”

Liam felt a hand between his shoulderblades and he was trotted off into the office they called the staff room. There was a Lenovo on the desk. Both the chairs had exposed foam at their wrists. Douglas sat; he sat too. It smelled of nothing. The laptop was whirring angrily, its fan probably full of dust.

“Sit down,” Douglas said, redundantly, both of them already sitting. “Do you know what, it’s not good.”

“What?”

“Yesterday! Charlotte. Surely you remember.”

“Obviously I remember, but it’s like—I didn’t do nothing to her.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter that I didn’t do nothing to her? Why are we here then?”

“It’s optics. It’s all about optics, Liam.”

“What optics?”

“It doesn’t look good, does it, if a client of ours believes she was assaulted by a trainer of ours, does it?”

“No. Assaulted? But that isn’t what happened. It wasn’t assault.”

“And are people going to listen to her in this community, been coming to Camelot eight, ten years, or you, a few weeks in?”

“They should listen to reality.”

“No. Life is not like that. If it were we wouldn’t be working for other people. There are—there are hierarchies.”

“So? Truth matters too, Doug.”

“Douglas. So. Truth does matter—and here, truth’s on her side. Charlotte’s asking for me to let you go.”

“And are you gonna?”

“Well what choice do I have?”

It burned. Liam instantly stood up. “Whatever mate.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re doing it to protect the business.”

“Well. Yes, I am? That is my job.”

“Yeah. Just following orders.”

“Well I’d be losing my job too if the business tanked, following this. Or if we fail to make profits.”

“Whatever man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s no way you’re sorry.”

“Look. I’m going to pay your final month’s salary up front. But you don’t need to come back tomorrow. You’ll get paid. But it just won’t work, having you here. We’re lucky she isn’t going to the police. You know that, don’t you? That you’re lucky?”

He stormed out, feeling hot and enraged and, even, theatrical, tearing off his Camelot polo as he left the staff room. He threw it to the floor. They could see what a real body was like—something entitled fuckers of their kind would never achieve. He benched three plates now. This was a crèche for the listless rich, and he didn’t like being thought of as a pet to lust after. Yet they could look now. Look at these fucking delts. His left shoulder vein stuck out in a detailed curl like the beach-sand excretions of lugworms. These were postmenopausal women who were back at it, or women in their thirties with neglecting husbands and boyfriends, half of them dropped, and half prowling, and he didn’t give a fuck.

*

The World’s End on a weekday afternoon. Could an interior be windswept? It was. Liam simply had nothing else to do. Lager one, lager two—they vaguely assuaged. Lagers three and four were fine: five six seven and eight were not. He then began to cease making memories. There were women he made a pass at. Prawn cocktail crisps were crushed into powder on the hard floors. Arctic Monkeys definitely played, and Kasabian, and, for some reason, Buddy Holly. He tried to meet people and was rebuffed. Today, it seemed, everyone was content to drink alone. Or, not alone, but they already had friends to drink with. He should take his shirt off again, seek attention. He should jump onto the sticky tables and boot pint glasses into the air. He should scream; he should be happy with this life of his—and wasn’t. There was very little charm in drinking alone in the afternoon if it was the only thing you had to do. He redownloaded Tinder and swiped in the corner of the pub, sat next to a mirror, into which he occasionally glanced, seeing only the blur of his consciousness as it faded into drunkenness. Were those the eyes he had? Weren’t they sharper, better than small-town eyes? What would tomorrow look like? At nine o’clock the barman stopped serving him. “Too pissed fella. Go home. You live near here? You need someone to walk you?”

*

He woke up with his legs in bed and his upper body and head on the floor. Lifting his head, he was stung by sharp pain at the back of his scalp, like the feeling off a scab being torn away. It sounded the way ripped fabric sounds, only wetter. He righted himself and felt his head. Blood, and something gorier than blood. What? And his phone was going mad.

Liam was fully dressed, albeit dishevelled. There was a note safetypinned to his shirt. On it, in big capital letters, was written:

Took you home. You hit your head. Drink water.

*

Having lost the main part of his income, Liam took up YouTube content creation again, this time doubling down on his work ethic. He went through the Reddit guides to going viral, making clickbait titles and horny thumbnails, and feeling the loss of something within himself every time he did so. He posted once a day now, free from the commute. All in, he could plan, record, and edit a video, at home, in about an afternoon. This meant he was free in the evenings—and being lonely, he was more often than not at The World’s End.

By the autumn of that year it was obvious he would not make enough to sustain himself. He was several grand overdrawn. His subscriber count had gone up, from 20k to 25k. He could expect to bring in £400 a month against a rent of £1,100 a month. Plus the cost of pints, £200 a week. Plus bills, plus weights and ropes and foam rollers and all the other appurtenances of a YouTube career. And his food, twenty-five-thousand calories a week, more than a kilogram of it protein. Shakes, creatine, pre’. He considered going on benefits for a while, before thinking of his father in HMP Woodville, and decided, instead, on a sleet-dark morning when the buses needed their headlights, that he’d go back to coaching.

He got a job locally this time. It was extremely fast. He had his YouTube on his CV and one of the hiring managers had even seen a few of his videos. Start tomorrow, they said—freelancing with your own clients, no contract, use our spaces—and he did, that November, and he began to work himself free of debts, and spent Christmas at the pub, and went to the New Year’s fireworks at Ally Pally, drinking himself silly, and welcomed January in a state of happy hangover. He did the same the following year.

*

Surely it was from the drink. Liam had a full-length mirror in his studio flat, and began to see where his abs were losing definition. Had he contracted something? He was a little podgy. Lovehandles. His tone a little wan. There had been a few random shags. What, an STI? Venereal disease? He thought he looked like a basset hound, the skin hanging away from his face. The red underflesh of the eyelids. Illness and hangover hitting at once. He would increase his cardio—a few 10k runs, twenty mins of rowing at the end of each workout. When taking clients through theirs, he could join in. Box jumps, skipping. Leading by example, and exercising out of the rut. That was January’s plan, and it became February’s, and he stuck to it with some doggedness.

But in March there was news everywhere of the virus—from Wuhan, and after a ski trip made by a consultant doctor, it came over to the UK. 100 people infected, and the first death. The Chief Medical Officer became a celebrity. Interest rates reached the lowest level in history. The FTSE crashed. Some of Liam’s colleagues were staying away. People began wearing facemasks in the gym. 1,000 people tested positive. Then everyone was at home. Overnight there was no work; Liam’s self-employed status was unclear. He was left in his single room with his bed, gym equipment, clothes, laptop, a creeping black mould, kitchenette, kettle, shower, and fucked toilet.

*

Because his work collapsed, he applied for Universal Credit. He hadn’t worked long enough to qualify for an allowance or business loans, and he wasn’t able to be furloughed. He was given enough to pay his rent, and no more. All expenditure—food, bills—was to drive him into debt.

*

For some weeks he began to feel despair.

*

Liam thought, given the free time, he might at last make it at YouTube. But tens of millions of others, mostly young men, had also taken to YouTube. They’d bought every dumbbell available in the world on Amazon. They were going for a hundred quid each: he sold some of his. Eight hundred pounds, enough for a month.

He spent this money on beers during his one hour out of the flat each day. He could buy an eighteen-pack of lager for £16 at Tesco. There was nothing else to do. After work, of course. He’d film his videos, make his content, and then relax. But, sometimes, he’d have a beer in the morning. Told himself it was just when his fears were most present that he most needed it. He sat through the burning March and burning April heatwaves in his un-airconditioned room (the window with suicide latches) and listened to music, drinking, scrolling his phone, and, very occasionally, reaching a state which was, more or less, like crying.

*

Bridget called in June, when people could go out again. Her smoker’s voice was sweet because it existed for him in a happier time.

“What are you doing with yourself?” she said.

“In my flat. Not much. Chilling. Not much.”

“And work? Have they got you on furlough?”

“No. I was self-employed as a PT. But the timings didn’t work. I’m—I’m actually on benefits.”

“Shocking, these lockdowns.”

“I know.”

“They ain’t thinking about the people who aren’t doing the posh jobs.”

“They’re not, no.”

“Shocking. Sunak, Boris—the lot of ‘em.”

“I know.”

“Well. Me and Emma are getting along well, thanks for asking—”

“Sorry, I—”

“I’m teasing you. Well, maybe you’d like to come back. We have a spare room. You wouldn’t need to be paying any rent or anything. Just when the world’s gone mad. Cos I know your granddad’s gone. Might be nice to have some familiar faces.”

“Bridg—”

“Just think about it. Offer’s there. We could form a bubble.”

*

What choice really? He rented a van, moved everything, about a tonne of weight, and drove through the long bright empty motorway through a long bright empty summer back home.

Crumbled, post-industrial Wolverton, with viaduct, petrol station, pub, river, canal; its barber’s, Skoda garage, carpet wholesaler, supermarkets, charity shops, vape shops, betting shops; its inflorescing hogweed and prowling bindweed, celandine, cleavers, nettles, purple toadflax and willowherb. Kids on BMXs, and salt on your lip from the summer heat—and so on, incalculable impressions building up only to a tedious whole, a non-place of dead ambition, and piss up the walls, and domestic abuse, and twenty-thousand tacit dreams.

What was going to happen would always have happened, of course, and he knew that in the recesses of his mind, even before it had begun: he got back with Em. You couldn’t, under the pressure of proximity, not do as such. Former love was a patient in need of defibrillation. It wasn’t quite corpse, wasn’t quite awake—but there were opportunities. Yes, she saw him showering on his second day; or, coming out of the shower, with a too-small towel and a loose knot at his hip. Even in this drinking phase of his, she’d’ve considered him a one-in-one-hundred looker. Even when he had his low moods. So it was natural. As natural as school friendships, exclusionary in their total perfection, which felt like the only possible permutations of friendship in the world. But there were many schools worldwide, and any permutation was aided by closeness. Em and Liam, then: it was all a matter of household.

It became fucking, but: love? He no longer cared. They had ciders in the garden where the unmown grass grew navel-high, and you had to flatten its blades with lawn chairs to sit down. Grasses thrumming insect life. Bridg busied herself about the house behind them. The sun set between the houses’ backsides. You had to move your chair into the ray that reached past chimneystacks, rolling round towards the west, consciously keeping yourself in the heat. Relaxation required effort in Wolverton. It tired you out, the thing you were meant to do when tired. The sun on you, like a searchlight.

*

Liam was able to squeeze his squat rack into Bridget’s shed, just, though it wasn’t tall enough to do an overhead press, requiring you to step into the garden proper. But you could work out and you could sequester yourself, and you could have a shot of tequila in your pre-workout or protein shake, just to, as they say, as they all say, take the edge off. Not that he did much working out now, for life seemed postponed. And, at times, it felt as though he were in a tunnel with no end.

He began hiding things. At first, just a few beers as he woke up. Cans, to make less noise in the binbags than bottles. He hid his depressions. Then he felt nothing from beer, and moved to vodka. It took about six months. He was out of work, and it was another lockdown, so what was the use? Society seemed to welcome it, this permanent stasis, this unreality, and mañana sense of procrastinated life. Why not drink? He could clean himself up at a later date. There’d be time enough. He wasn’t an addict. He was someone who liked a drink and was perpetually holidaying. Up went the national debt; down went Liam—and he didn’t mind, really, he didn’t mind, he told himself.

Feeling very bad became normal, and to medicate it, he drank. He was never sure if the new spreading numbness was helping, or masking—but either way, masking was its own helping. His hands shook regularly, as bad as Parkinson’s. His skin smelled, and yellowed, giving out an odour somewhere between sweat and yeast. Em asked after him, and Bridget even more than Em, but he felt he must obfuscate whatever roiling he felt within, and kept up the decorum of aftershave, washing his hair, dressing properly. Bridget thought it could be Covid-19.

His first hospitalisation occasioned a family moment. They were family now: he’d begun calling Bridg “Nan”, as Em’d always done. He felt fine, with a little glass of vodka in hand, standing before the TV, the remote in his other. Then his vision went, and he blacked out, and he woke up on a trolley in the back of an ambulance, Em and Bridg with him. Had a seizure, they said. Shaking an awful lot, terrible, terrible. But they weren’t allowed into the hospital—Covid restrictions. Everyone was in masks again. Liam didn’t listen to much of what the paramedics or doctors had to say to him. Couldn’t: he had the dark tunnel around him now, in which he hated himself.

Finally, after all the hours of waiting, and a day, maybe two, he was discharged from MK Hospital, and they picked him up, and got a taxi home together. He clambered out, not able to make it up the stairs to bed, collapsing on the sofa. Bridg brought pillows and a blanket; Em watched. He slept, on and off, till four, waking with trembling limbs, vomiting weakly in a bowl they’d placed on the carpet. Then he saw Em—she’d slept in the armchair by his side, and was woken, Bridg must’ve heard too, because she came down, saying:

“You’ve got it on the carpet, Liam.”

“He’s a mess Nan.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t feel right. “Can I just get some more sleep?”

“Pisshead,” Em said.

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s an alcoholic, Em,” Bridg told her, defensive. He was so, so grateful.

“I’m not doing well,” he said.

“We can fucking see that,” Em said. She fluttered about, clattering, bringing forth rubber gloves, disinfectant, a bucket, a mop.

“I’m sorry.”

She went on at him, on her knees by the sofa, cleaning, wearing her rage out over ten minutes. Wouldn’t he have done the same, if he’d been the partner of Liam Cromwell, dealing with this?

*

In order to be hungover, you had to drink. In order to not be hungover, you had to drink. You were always either hungover or drunk.

*

Em had begun sleeping in a separate bed. Well: she’d moved from the bedroom which she shared with Liam to her childhood bedroom. It still had pink walls and unicorns on the curtains. The sheets were Bratz. It smelled of synthetic vanilla candles, buried in a drawer. Once or twice, while she was sleeping, Liam would stand in the door, his little water bottle of vodka in hand. Just hydrating. He watched her woodland-creature manner of sleeping. Paws up by the face. The hair ragged. She didn’t snore, but her breath was dry and audible in that overheated room.

*

“I’ve got to help you Liam,” Bridg said to him one day, as he unspooled on the sofa, half naked, his gut hanging down his side like shopping bags full of shopping. Handing him toast with marmalade, she asked, “Can you stop? Can I help you stop?”

“I can’t stop. I’m so sorry. Please leave me alone.”

“I’m tryin’a help. I know down at church they have these courses—they’re for people who are in need of a helping hand.”

“I couldn’t go to that. I feel too rough. I don’t want to be seen. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“But to stop it before it gets worse?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

*

He tried, a few times, to get back into lifting. But he didn’t have much willpower left to him. And he couldn’t lift heavy now. He did dumbbells, sometimes, in his bedroom, shaking, shaking. To what end? he thought, having another drink. And then he began to have other thoughts. Thoughts which had existed, and which he had not been brave enough to look at, but which now excited him.

*

London, great offeror, was likewise the taker of takers. Giving energy, it drew energy from you on equal terms, and it was for you to maintain autonomy over the equilibrium. Lean in too little or too much—well. Those of indefatigable, headlong character were liable to thrill in its atmosphere, or be drowned in it.

Liam drowned. Whereas he might’ve done something, had he been a stronger person, had he been able to stand things a little more, had he had the fortitude. That wasn’t the person he was born as. Or, perhaps born as, but with events interceding—Dad, Mum, then Granddad, life from the off nothing more than a coming to terms with loss, of being beat down and built up and beat back down again, nothing ever going right, all good times preludes only to bad. And you could undergo a lot of this, he’d found, more than a lot, but then there came that which you could not undergo. Like an emetic—like one drink beyond your limit. You began seeing a certain horizon which, though terrible, was less terrible than the other terror.

No, he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t have the strength, in the end. Maybe he had been making his body strong to counteract a strength he lacked. There were mothers, weren’t there, shaped like old turnips and overborne by the weight of efforts, who nevertheless turned out, daily, feeding and raising children and keeping homes—strong women. There were men who sat silently at computers for forty years, strong enough to carry despair with them and never let it have its victory. Or children who, seeking friends at the age of most need, found only others’ cruelty—and who were, despite everything, able to go on. No, maybe Liam lacked something that they had. The sole perfection he’d had proposed to him, his birthright, was not of the right sort. Could he be blamed? He had tried, hadn’t he?—and trying was its own success, even where it was failure. That was, anyway, what he’d wished to believe about himself. And hadn’t.

*

It wasn’t only to be Bridg and Em at Liam’s funeral: his Dad came, on release from the cell where he lived which was a short walk from the train tracks where Liam’d died. And it wasn’t only the three of them—thirty or so schoolfriends who still had memories of how he’d been when they’d known him were there, gossipy, teary, keen for the wake. Yes, and Bridg and Em, left behind in Wolverton, had to host it, for who else was there?

*

His father placed onto his coffin cultivated roses and lilies. Not cow parsley, not bluebells, not brambles, not dandelions. Nothing wild.

*

For there are in life ways of bettering and ways of not; and that which opens up as the path to take is only rarely the right path, being more often the opportune one, the close one, the only one available. Real knowing is not knowing how to head back, but knowing to head to the unseen end. In some, the end cannot be reached. That is a rule of life, true and ghastly. Some don’t succeed enough to fail. Tragic lights shine both least and shortest.

* * * * *

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