‘Why didn’t you mention it when I came in?’ said Ginger.
‘We didn’t want you to go home because I thought you might be a bit embarrassed,’ Grace said. ‘My niece doesn’t like pictures of herself, but this is fabulous. Get you all sorts of men.’
Her eyes glittered at Ginger.
‘Aunt Grace, you’re shameful,’ said Ginger, but she was grinning too. ‘I don’t want all sorts of men.’
Grace cackled a little bit. ‘Said no woman ever!’
For her first training session at the gym, Ginger bought a special pair of new trainers that had involved the mortification of going into a sports shop in the first place and being fitted for them.
‘What you going to be doing?’ asked the lithe girl assisting her.
‘Er ... CrossFit,’ said Ginger, feeling the ludicrousness of the whole situation. This woman must be thinking:you’re fat!Youcan’t cross-train. Go home and eat the contents of your fridge, babe.
But she didn’t seem to be. She treated the whole thing seriously, which was more than Ginger could do.
In a state of high anxiety, Ginger bought the first pair that fitted. Then, she embarked on a two-hour excavation of her wardrobe to find something,anything,that would look reasonable in a gym.
So for her training session with a man called Will Stapleton, who owned the gym and looked disturbingly sexy on the website despite shaggy blond surfer hair, she was wearing an overlarge black T-shirt, an industrial-strength sports bra, a pair of loose black leggings and the new trainers.
In fear, she had weighed herself: something she almost never did.
She was nearly fourteen stone. Ginger winced. But at least she knew before the inevitability of the weigh-in. Better to know now, right?
The gym turned out to be a large, warehouse-style premises that was painted black and was pretty quiet at that point in the afternoon. Ginger made her way over to an inside reception desk where a friendly-looking young guy greeted her. He was about twenty and looked sweet, not at all threateningly fit and cool.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘can I help?’
Yes, thought Ginger,you could magically explain all about CrossFit and let me leave here without having to do anything with some hot, muscly guy who’d look down at me for being a sloth. But that was not the answer this guy needed.
‘Er, yes ... I’m here to see Will,’ she said. ‘I’m Ginger Reilly and—’
‘Ginger! Will is looking forward to this,’ interrupted the guy delightedly. ‘Come on, I think he’s in his office.’
‘OK,’ said Ginger. Her chance of running out of here was disappearing.
Courage, she told herself.
Getting to Will involved going through the centre of the gym, and even though it wasn’t busy, there were plenty of people around working out, people who would look at Ginger and judge her. People who worked out always judged fat people.
But while she saw a lot of people lifting kettlebells and doing a confusing variety of lunges, nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention.
Neither were they all thin gym bunnies – they were normal-shaped people; some lean, some like herself, which astonished Ginger. They were all listening to various coaches or concentrating very hard on what they were doing.
All she needed was to talk to the Will person with the surfer hair, let him look her up and down and find her lacking, and then be sent off with the sweet young guy and let loose on a running machine or something. Even she couldn’t mess that up.
Sweet young guy peered around, then stopped by a wall where a tall man with muscles on his muscles was coaxing a teenage girl into squats.
The man had his back to them but the girl was possibly eighteen and she made Ginger think of herself at that age: verging on the plump, with a lip bitten down from nibbling at it anxiously. Yet this girl didn’t look as if she was uncomfortable: she looked determined. Her long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail and she held two small hand-weights.
‘You can do this, Marina. We’re going to do six sets, take a break, then six more. Sure, you’re going to feel sore tomorrow, but that means you’ve worked your body, this is the last part of the workout.’
‘OK,’ said the girl, gritting her teeth. ‘I can do this.’
‘Yes,’ said the guy, encouraging her, ‘you can do this.’
Ginger and the sweet young guy watched Marina as she squatted and as the big man counted down the squats, ‘Six, five, four ...’
