Personal Trainer

The armoured red shirt meets his client at the gym’s cafe – where he swills down an espresso and a shake of undetermined constituents. What an oddity their meeting is. His garish muscles threaten to rupture from the sleeves of his golf shirt (now leotard) and invade the Middle East. His eyes glint from the depths of his deep tan which is ‘full body’. He uses the term ‘full body’ quite a bit now. Margery’s ample 50 something body sways blithely with womanhood and overflows into the cafe with few regrets. She is consumed by frumpiness and frizziness despite her black jogging suite. “Let’s start with an assessment”, the trainer offers, delighted with the amount of syllables he has managed to cram into his new sentence. Of course the assessment had begun and ended when Margery had negotiated the turnstile on her arrival.

The trainer woos Margery with words like ‘orbitrex’, ‘gyrotonics’ and ‘glutes’ as she wades through the treadmill distractedly. The clients with master’s degrees were always harder to get ‘on board’. Margery is then paraded around the gym as she lifts weights into the air for ‘upper body’, lunging and reaching in an elephantine underwater ballet. Five, Six, Seven. He is the handsome zoo-keeper, she the manatee. Onlookers catch a glimpse between pants and grunts - drawn to the shapeliness of the trainer and the spectacle of the trainee. On the step machine the trainer initiates a conversation about the dangers of carbohydrates and spray tanning while Margery replies with the occasional gasp. David Guetta’s ‘Sexy Bitch’ blasts from the speakers drowning out the uncommonness between them. “Same time next week?” Margery winces in agreement unravelling her posture into her now damp jogging suite. The trainer has not broken a sweat. It is doubtful whether he ever has.