Five fire extinguishers strapped to his head
Note to self: remember the great gulf between how physical exercise looks and how it actually feels. On billboards, in commercials for sportswear, in movie montages, nothing seems more exciting, ecstatic even, than the stretch and the burn, the pumping heart and the surging blood, the air-punch, then afterwards that moment of standing hands-on-knees, sweat dripping on to the athletics track. No accident that it resembled sex. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
The reality was discomfort, edging into pain. Breathing, usually an unconscious act, now felt impossibly hard, as if her sports bra was being wound tighter with a windlass. Halfway up the hill she felt she was inhaling through a pillow, her lungs rattling with great gouts of phlegm, her heart rebelling and trying to punch its way out through her sternum. Was this what a heart attack felt like? She had once vomited into a hand towel during a spin class, and here it was again, that same feeling of distress and discomfort and embarrassment. Her nose was blocked and yet some kind of liquid, some unnameable salt-sweet combination of snot and sweat coursed down her philtrum into her open mouth. She might put a finger to her nostril and blow, like a footballer, but was there a way to do this coquettishly, to hawk and spit with élan, to kittenishly throw up? She wouldn’t be pulling this face in a Clapham small plates restaurant, her Stallone-arm-wrestling face, teeth bared, squinting through the perspiration that had combined with eye make-up and moisturiser to create a concoction of salt, acid and oil, a vinaigrette basically, that burnt her eyes. She dug at the sockets with her knuckles, saw the smudges, thought Great, two black holes.
They were still on Hobbies and Interests, and for some time Conrad had been talking with knowledge and passion about Formula One racing, how it was a mistake to think it’s all about the car, how those guys are actually athletes. ‘People think it’s just driving in circles, but at a hundred and seventy miles per hour that’s 5G, enough to snap your neck.’
Would her own neck snap? She felt it might, and perhaps that would be a good thing. The weight of her pack felt like a great hand pulling her backwards, a big capital W of sweat had appeared beneath her breasts and now some other object, the heel of her evening shoes or the corner of Wainwright’s The Central Fells, jabbed her liver every step and meanwhile—
‘A driver’s heart rate’s a hundred and eighty-five beats per minute, that’s bam-bam-bam, three times a second. Can you imagine?’
‘I can actually.’ Why wasn’t he out of breath? ‘Tell me more.’
She had no strong feelings about Formula One, placing it in a category of things that appeal to men, like wetsuits and samurai swords and big watches. Conrad’s own watch was the size of a pub ashtray. Her ex-husband Neil had something similar, though his was a ten-dollar fake, bought on Canal Street in New York on their honeymoon. Like the marriage, it had stopped working almost immediately, but though the purchase had been a joke, she knew he’d longed for the real thing. She’d laughed at him once, affectionately, she’d thought, that had been the intention, for buying a men’s health magazine and following a regime that promised the arrival of killer abs in thirty days. Each morning she’d counted down the days to their appearance, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, until he’d snapped, ‘Could you please stop jeering at me for one fucking minute, please?’, startled once again by the venom Neil could impart to the word ‘please’. She had apologised, of course, though the apology might have been more muted if she’d known that he was getting in shape for the benefit of his girlfriend at work. She would never know if the abs arrived because he’d left on day fifteen. He certainly looked better the next time she saw him, healthier and happier, so something good had come out of it.
‘With the weight of the helmet, the force on a driver’s neck at that speed, it’s like having five fire extinguishers strapped to their head.’
‘I’m sorry, wait. Why do they have fire extinguishers strapped to their head?’
‘They don’t, they don’t – that’s just what the force feels like.’
‘Sorry, I lost the thread … Can we just …?’
She stopped for a moment and doubled over. There were various questions she might ask about Formula One – is it a sport or an engineering competition? What about women? – but they all seemed hostile, and it was important not to mock things that others enjoy. But she’d been awake now for twelve hours, home was impossibly far away, and she wanted more than anything to lie in a dark room. She squinted at the summit through burning eyes.
‘You okay?’
‘Yes, yes! Call my sports psychologist! Let’s keep moving. I don’t want to die here,’ she said, and thought of a joke. She would put her hands on her hips indignantly, exhale and say, ‘Well, this is not a hill that I’m prepared to die on!’ If she did it now, she’d fumble the timing. She’d save it for the summit. For now, she asked, ‘So in a Formula One car, is the gear box manual or automatic?’
‘Semi-automatic. With eight gears!’
‘Eight! Wow. And is there a reverse?’
‘Surprisingly, there is.’
‘For the big shop in Sainsbury’s?’
‘Ha. Right.’
‘You’re a real petrol-head, Conrad.’
‘A little, maybe. Do you like cars, Marnie?’
‘No, I’m a public-transport-head. Ask me about buses. Near me, you’ve got the three, the one nine six. Along South Lambeth Road, the eighty-eight can reach speeds of nearly twelve miles an hour.’ But it sounded like she was jeering again and now the breathlessness was back. ‘Tell me, what’s the best race you’ve seen?’ she said, just to get them to the top of the hill.
At the summit they gathered by a pile of stones; she threw off her rucksack and wiped the vinaigrette from her eyes. This, she supposed, was the air-punch moment and she could certainly have punched something – the man who’d sold her the boots or Jenson Button. She drank water, caught her breath and looked dutifully at the panorama. To the west, a patched green plain unfurled towards the sea, which reflected the low sun back at them, but she refused to be awed. Big things in the distance look smaller. Fine, get over it.
‘Very nice,’ said Conrad.
Marnie saw her chance and put her hands on her hips. ‘You know, this is not a hill that I’m pre—’
‘That’s Scotland over there, the other side of the Solway Firth.’ The knitwear model had stepped on her joke. ‘There’s the Isle of Man. Over there, that’s where we’ve come from. And now look over there …’
Resentfully, she turned and there they were, the Lumps, erupting abruptly from the plain, too steep and suddenly near as if they’d somehow snuck up. ‘That’s where we’re going,’ he said, ‘over that range tomorrow, those mountains the day after, then the biggest climb on Tuesday.’
‘Well, rather you than me, mate,’ said Conrad.
‘When are you leaving, Conrad?’ said Marnie, as casually as she could.
‘Monday morning.’
‘Fnuh,’ she said.
‘Back to work Tuesday.’
Marnie felt a little panicked. ‘When are you leaving, Cleo?’
‘Eh, Monday morning too.’
‘Oh. Oh. I thought you were staying on longer.’
‘Anthony’s got something, haven’t you?’ Anthony nodded. ‘What about you?’
‘Tuesday night,’ she said, and wondered if perhaps she saw the other man flinch. ‘But the ticket’s flexible so …’
The ticket was not flexible. She’d thought they’d have longer. All those expensive plasters, the rubber water bladder. She’d brought twelve pairs of pants.
‘Or you can drive back with us, get the train from York?’
‘Okay. Okay. That’s okay. Let’s see. Let’s see.’
The other man was scanning the ground for another stone, a freak for rocks and minerals. ‘We should get going if we want to be there before evening,’ said Gravel Boy, selecting and placing a pebble reverently on the top of the cairn as if it were the star on a Christmas tree. They picked up their bags, fell into step and Marnie asked Conrad if there was a Formula Two and Conrad said, funnily enough there was and told her all about it.