The gym at three in the morning

I work twelve-hour shifts and I come off the ward at half two. There is no sleeping after twelve hours on your feet, so I train. That isn't discipline, it's the opposite: it's what's left over when a person can't stop.

The branch on the corner is open all night. At three in the morning there are two people on the weights floor, me included, and a lad on reception called Wesley who sleeps sitting up with admirable competence.

The television is always on the same thing. A news channel with the sound off and subtitles, running the same item about the exchange rate.

My Tuesday is back and biceps.

He started turning up in July.

A man of about forty, tall, with the build of somebody who once had a routine, lost it, and came back. His programme is well put together. You can tell.

In the first week the two of us did not exchange one word. Two people in a four-hundred-square-metre room at three in the morning are under no obligation to interact, and we both exercised that right with enthusiasm.

In the second week he came past the lat pulldown and told me I was pulling with my arm.

He was right, which was annoying.

"You pull with the elbow. Pretend your hand is only a hook."

"I know."

"I know you know. You were pulling with your arm."

I did the set again properly, and I felt the difference, and I did not thank him. He wasn't waiting to be thanked. He went back to his leg press.

By the third week we had started counting each other's reps.

That is a thing specific to gyms with no equivalent anywhere else. You stand there, a metre from a person who is straining, and you count. Eight. Nine. And on the tenth you put two fingers under the bar without taking any weight off it, purely so the person knows somebody is there.

It's an entire contract inside one gesture.

I started doing bench on Tuesdays, which is not part of my Tuesday.

He started doing back.

Neither of us remarked on the coincidence of those two changes to the schedule.

A technical detail that matters: to spot properly you stand behind the bench, feet apart, level with the head of whoever is lying down.

It is the correct position. It is the position any instructor teaches on day one. It's how I learned it in 2016 and how I do it with everybody.

In the fourth week, when he lay down on the bench and I took up position, I took nearly a second longer than necessary to get my hands to the bar.

A second is nothing. It is also enough for two people to look up and down respectively, and for neither of them to mention it.

He did twelve. I counted all twelve out loud and my voice changed between the eighth and the tenth.

In the fifth week Wesley wasn't on reception.

There was a note on the desk saying "back in a min", with a pen on top of it, which is the most universally vague object in existence. We found out later he had gone to a bakery six streets away.

It was twenty past three. The floor was empty. The in-house radio was playing something at low volume for nobody.

I was stretching on a mat near the mirror, which is the most hidden corner of the room because it sits behind the cable frame.

He came over and sat on the mat beside mine. He said nothing. He sat the way a person sits to stretch, legs apart, torso forward, and stayed there.

"What time does your shift end?"

"Seven tomorrow morning."

"So you've got tonight."

I said I did.

Here is a thing nobody tells you about a gym at three in the morning: it is the best-lit place in the whole neighbourhood.

White LED, high ceiling, and twelve metres of mirrored wall giving all of it back. There is no dark corner. What there is, is a blind spot, which is a different thing, and the blind spot in that branch is between the cable frame and the wall of weight plates.

We went there without agreeing anything out loud, the way two people cross a road together without agreeing anything.

The rubber floor is warm. That surprised me.

His shirt was wet across the back and the shoulders, and so was mine, and both of us smelled exactly like a person who has trained for forty minutes, and neither of us minded, which in my experience is the precise border between liking somebody and not.

He asked once, quietly, whether this was all right. I said it was. That was the last question.

We went about it with the care of people who know the front door is glass and gives onto the pavement. That imposes an economy of movement which, in all honesty, improved everything.

Wesley got back at 3:51.

I know the time because there's a turnstile, and the turnstile logs it, and I saw the log on his screen over the counter later while I was badging out.

When he came in I was on the treadmill, walking at five, which is the speed of a person doing nothing.

He was on the leg press with no plates on the machine at all.

Wesley asked if anybody had come in. I said no. He said that hour is dead anyway and offered me half a toastie, which I took.

That was three weeks ago.

We still do Tuesdays and Thursdays. We still count each other's reps. He still corrects my grip on the pulldown, which is still annoying and still correct.

I don't know his surname. I know he had shoulder surgery on the left in 2019 and that because of it he won't go over twenty-five kilos on overhead press, and I know the exact hour at which he gives up pretending he came here to train.

Twenty past three.

Wesley still goes out for the toasties.