Every Woman Knows a Secret

In Jess’s home town of Ditchley, a dozen miles from the nursery, two boys arrived at a side-street gym. The road outside was busy with cars and delivery vans making their way around the pedestrianised main street, and the chain stores in the precinct were busy with early lunch-time custom, but there was only a handful of people in the gym. The boys pushed their way into the locker room, confident to the point of arrogance, and changed into sweatpants with vests cut to bare their shoulders, and broad leather weight-lifters’ belts. In the gym they stood in front of the mirrors waiting for a fresh loop of music to come pounding out of the overhead speakers, then began their workout. After a few minutes they were both slick with sweat and grinning with the high of their exertions.

The older one said, ‘Right then, Dan. Alternate curls and kickbacks.’

Dan was nineteen, the younger by three years. He was dark and good-looking, although thinner and less muscled than his friend. He rattled a pair of dumbbells from the rack in front of the mirrors and weighed them in his hands. Then he began to work again, curling up and relaxing each arm in turn, fists clenched around the weights. The muscles of his upper arm tightened and the cords stood out in his neck. His lips pulled back in a painful grimace that bared his teeth and he began to grunt softly with the effort of hauling fist to shoulder.

His friend watched. ‘Nine, ten, Danny boy. Eleven, twelve. Three more, go.’ He was grinning again, circling him, taunting as well as encouraging. Danny finished the set with a gasp of triumph and let the weights drop.

‘Shit, Rob.’

‘Kickbacks now.’ Rob would not let him rest between repetitions, and Danny did not want to seem to need a respite. He picked up another dumbbell at once and bent from the waist. One-handed and with a stiff wrist he swung the weight up behind him and back like a piston. Down and up. His breath hissed as he counted the repetitions. At fifteen he changed hands and repeated the set. ‘Yeah. Fuck,’ he groaned. He clanged the weight back on to the rack and dropped on to a bench, wiping his forehead with the inside of his wrist.

Rob picked a heavier pair of weights and squared himself to the mirror. His hair was long, shoulder length with a mass of coppery and bronze coils loosely tied with a piece of cord. He tossed it back with a jerk of his head as his arms curled taut, the triceps bulging. He made the weights look momentarily weightless.

Danny watched, openly admiring. At the changeover Rob smiled sidelong at him.

‘See how it’s done?’

‘Yeah, right, Arnie.’

Rob mimed a punch and Danny parried it, snorting with laughter. They scuffled for a minute, with an edge of real threat between them only just submerged. The music pounded on and one of the other men in the gym briefly glanced up from his exertions.

‘C’mon. Bench press now,’ Rob ordered.

Shoulder to shoulder Danny and Rob strode down the gym to where the big barbells were racked in sullen pyramids. Looking in the mirror behind Rob’s back, Danny rotated each shoulder in turn, easing the protesting muscles.

When the boys emerged into the daylight after their workout, it was early in the afternoon. Young women were clicking back to work from their lunch hour and the bins outside McDonald’s were heaped with litter. Danny stood with his sports bag slung over one shoulder, challengingly watching a pair of girls go by. His black hair was wet, slicked flat from the shower. One of the pair glanced back at him over her shoulder, half smiling a sly invitation.

‘Coming for a pint?’ Rob asked. Danny nodded and turned his back on the girl.

Rob’s hair took on a metallic glitter from the window lights of an electrical goods shop. His handsome face was sharpened by a thin nose and a long-lipped mouth curved like a woman’s. He led the way through the bunches of shoppers, his shoulders broad in a scuffed leather jacket, his gym bag loosely held in one hand.

The pub was warm and steamy with the smell of beer and cigarette smoke. A television flickered over the bar and through an archway a man in overalls leaned on a snooker cue while his opponent lined up a shot. Rob flipped a coin on to the cushion and turned to the bar. With their full pints the boys sat at a table and stretched out their long legs, commandeering the space, pleased with the afterglow of exercise and the soft space of the afternoon ahead of them.

‘You’re doing well,’ Rob said expansively. He folded his lower lip over the upper to erase the froth of beer. Danny checked his expression for mockery and decided that Rob was being straight.

‘Yeah, thanks. I feel good.’

‘You going to go on training?’

‘Oh, yeah. I should think. You know?’

Sitting in the bleary comfort of the pub, with worked muscles and a thirst and an afternoon and an evening to enjoy, Dan had a precise awareness of the pleasures of life. He remembered the girl outside the gym. Nice legs. And then he forgot her again, because he never had any problems with getting girls. Rob’s company was of a different order.

They had been at the same school, a tough, oversized comprehensive for boys, on the north side of the town, only a couple of miles from the pub where they were sitting. But the difference in their ages had meant that Rob had been too far ahead of Danny even to notice his existence. In those days, Rob had been a loner. He had been big and strong, but he had never bothered to involve himself with the football team or any other of the school sports that Danny hankered after. There was a self-containment and an aura of toughness about Rob Ellis that struck Danny as enviably cool.

And then, four months ago, after Danny had finished his A-levels and was idling away his time in a search for non-existent part-time work, he had seen Rob sitting in another pub. There was a toolbag at his feet and he was reading a paperback. Danny took the seat next to him, and when Rob failed to look up he asked him boldly if the book was good, since he seemed so absorbed in it. Rob glanced at him, without recognition, and flipped the book over so Danny could read the front cover. It was by Don DeLillo, a writer Danny had never heard of.

They had begun a desultory conversation and Rob agreed that he did remember Daniel Arrowsmith, just. After that they had met for a game of squash, then an evening’s drinking. They had become friends, but even though the odd folding and eliding of adult time had made them more or less contemporaries, Danny had an uneasy sense that they were not equals. He needed to match Rob’s achievements with his own. The murmured complaint of his shoulder and neck muscles was a reminder of it.

Dan took a long swallow of his beer. He was glad to be with Rob. The day was panning out fine.

The man in overalls passed in front of them.

‘You’re on.’ He jerked his thumb at the table.

‘Thanks, mate.’

Rob weighed a cue in his hand and massaged the tip of it with the chalk cube.

‘Have a couple of quid on it?’

With a reflex motion Danny patted the back pocket of his jeans where his wallet sat.

‘Sure.’

The pub emptied in the afternoon lull and there were no rival demands for the table. The racing flickered unwatched on the television while they played a competitive game, circling the table, standing with folded arms to watch one another’s breaks, not talking much.

Danny won. ‘Give you the best of three?’ he offered, and bought another two pints.

Out of three games, Danny won two. Unable to stop himself smiling, he pocketed Rob’s money.

‘You’ve been getting some practice in,’ Rob acknowledged. ‘And I thought you students were supposed to go to lectures and study and worry about your loans and your CVs all the time.’

‘It’s not all beer and sex and snooker, mate.’

‘Sounds like it is to me.’

This was not smooth ground. Rob had not achieved the necessary qualifications to go to university, even to the local polytechnic-turned-university where Danny was a student. He worked as a self-employed carpenter, building fitted kitchens if he was lucky and alcove shelves if he was not. It would not take much of a spark to fire an argument about the difference in their circumstances.

‘You want another pint?’ Danny asked, shrugging.

They had drunk three pints apiece and the afternoon had drifted away. Rob leaned against the wall with his arms stretched along the greasy dado rail. The bar was already filling again with little groups of day’s-end people who put briefcases on the floor and draped mackintoshes over the chairs. The haven was being invaded and he was in any case bored with it.

‘No. I could handle some food, though.’

Outside, the greenish remnants of daylight had been swallowed by the multicolours of shop windows and street lights. It was drizzling, and the black road was shining with wet and the red splinters of refracted tail-lights. The traffic had closed in and there was a thrum of idling engines at the traffic lights, and the compressed noise of lined-up in-car stereos. The boys hesitated, turning up the collars of their jackets and squinting in the rain. Most of the shops were closing but there was a café on the corner. Rob pointed and they ran to it.

At a table in a wood-partitioned booth they ordered a fry-up and chips. After a dozen mouthfuls Rob paused, his fork poised.

‘What do you fancy doing tonight?’ He looked sideways at Danny, across the narrow bridge of his nose. His eyes were elongated, greenish, expressing a challenge even when there was none.

Dan hesitated. ‘I ought to go back.’ He still lived at home. It was cheaper than digs and his grant didn’t go far.

‘Sure. Don’t want to be late and get into trouble, do you?’

They both laughed at the idea. Again, Danny had an expansive sense of the pleasures of life, lent a hazy and seductive glow by the beer he had drunk. The door opened with a gust of cold and rain, and a gang of girls came in.

There were four of them. They wore little belted coats, shiny and crackling, that peeled off to reveal short skirts and fuzzy knitted tops. They crowded together into the booth opposite the boys, clattering and giggling and banging their handbags on the table. One of them had long thin legs in thick black tights, and buckled ankle boots with high heels. Her long dark hair was beaded with rain and as she flicked it back she stared boldly under her fringe at Danny.