The Spa Day (3 page)

‘Well – that’s only three or four times a year! A lot of
women wouldn’t put up with that sort of appalling, selfish behaviour!’

He says it in such a way that it’s funny, not rude or
insulting. I like him, gay or not. I’m trying to think of a response, but nothing
comes to mind.

‘OK. We’re finished for today. You’ve done very well.
Really. Most clients run away after just a few minutes of that. I’m going to
put a blanket over you and leave you to recover on your own for a while. When
you’re ready, you can get up and get dressed. Don’t steal the blanket.’ He wags
a finger at me. ‘And don’t forget to shower before using the pool! I’ll be
checking for droplets of oil on the surface later on.’

As he closes the door, I close my eyes. Is that true, I
wonder? A lot of women wouldn’t put up with that? Perhaps I’m some sort of
saint! I take a deep breath. I feel like I’ve been run over by a car. The
driver stopped, looked in his rear view mirror and then reversed over me, for
good measure. I take another deep breath and turn over onto my side.

Two

After I have a shower (nice as it smells, it feels better to
get that massage oil off my skin) and get into my swimsuit, I sit down by the
side of the pool with a cup of herbal tea. There were three choices in the
teabag thingy: Kashmiri Green Thai tea,
Goji
Berry
Rooibos or Scarlet Glow (containing hibiscus and elderflower).

I decided to go with Scarlet Glow as it sounded nicer than
the others. I’ve never been a great fan of herbal tea (
McVitie’s
Milk Chocolate Digestives don’t taste the same when you dunk them in it!), but
this is actually quite nice. Whether it’s a habit I’ll continue when I get home
is something else, of course. I’ll probably be back on the Hot Lava Java with
three sugars and full fat milk (with an almond biscotti on the saucer)!

I’ve got two hours before my next appointment (a Tai Chi
private session, no less!) and I’m just about to ponder diving in the pool and
doing a few healthy lengths when I spot Rebecca wandering around. I didn’t see
her come in and I’m not in the mood to talk to her, so I take off my robe and
slip into the steam room. She might come in here, of course, in which case I’m
sunk, but she doesn’t look like a steam room sort of person to me (whatever a
steam room sort of person looks like). She might fall apart like my book did.

It’s so dense with steam that I can hardly see anything, but
after a few seconds I can make out the shapes of two other women and an
overweight bald bloke who’s smiling at nothing, which is a bit weird. No one is
sitting on the higher bench, so I go up there to avoid making small talk with
the others. The downside of this is that it feels like my face is burning off,
but that’s a small price to pay for being selectively antisocial. Also, I’ll be
more difficult to see if Rebecca decides to open the door and have a look
inside.

I start wondering just how much time someone like Rebecca
spends here. She said that this was her eighth time this year. Let’s give her
the benefit of the doubt and assume that each stay is more or less a week.
That’s about eight weeks. Two months! That can’t be right, can it? What does
she do for the other ten months of the year? She obviously doesn’t work, at
least not in the normal sense of the word. Maybe she helps with charities,
though I can’t quite see it.

It’s somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred to
stay here for a week. Could be more, depending on the sort of room you stay in
and which advance booking deal you use. Factoring in all the treatments she probably
has, she could be spending at least ten thousand pounds a year here! Jesus
Christ! And she indicated that her husband, sorry - hubby pays for it. What
must his job be when he can throw money like that around on, effectively,
nothing? I hope she’s phenomenally good in bed!

My stay here cost over five hundred pounds and I’d been
saving up for four-and-a-bit months for that. I can only hope that if you’re
like Rebecca, it becomes less and less of a treat each time you come here and I
don’t mean come here in the same way Rebecca does!

I’m starting to feel dizzy and a little nauseous, so I get
out of the steam room, have a lovely, refreshing swim and head back to my room
to get changed. Clive said he’d be texting me today, so I check my mobile but
there’s nothing. I type in a brief text: How r u? Anything exciting happening
today? Xxx and send it to him.

It’s stupid, but I always expect people to reply to texts
instantaneously, as if you’re actually talking to them in real time. I stare
dumbly at my mobile but, predictably, nothing happens and I chuck it onto the
bed.

I decide to have a short sleep before my Tai Chi session,
but after ten minutes or so I’m still awake. I thought that after the massage,
steam bath and swim I’d be feeling a little wiped out, but the opposite seems
to be true. Maybe that’s the point of all those things – you have more energy.
I can’t have drunk a cup of coffee for at least twenty-four hours, so that
might have something to do with it as well. I read that drinking lots of coffee
actually creates fatigue rather than prevents it. It doesn’t feel like that’s
the case, but I guess it must be true if it was in Cosmopolitan.

So I stare at the ceiling for a while, dimly aware of a dull
pain in my shoulders and the left side of my back where James did his worst.
It’s funny – I don’t often have any time to myself to actually just lie down
and think about nothing. I decide I don’t like it very much. There’s a host of
things that are bubbling at the back of my mind, but usually I’m just able to
cut them dead just as they begin to beg for attention.

I start to think about what James said when I told him that
Clive worked in Hong Kong. It all seems so normal to me now that I tend to
forget how strange it might seem to other people. Even Rebecca reacted with
surprise when I told her that I hadn’t ever been out there. I’ve never even
considered going out there, to tell you the truth. For one thing, I couldn’t
afford it (and Clive’s company isn’t about to jet me out there for nothing),
and for another, I don’t really think of it as a place, just somewhere where
Clive works. That’s a bit strange, now I come to think of it.

I’ve been seeing Clive for just over three years now and we
got engaged just under a year ago. It was Clive’s idea, I think. I really can’t
remember. I recall that one night we’d been out with some people from the UK
branch of his company and he introduced me as his fiancée. Just like that! I
couldn’t remember whether we’d actually ever talked about getting married, or
whether he thought it would show the people he worked with that he was a
stable, heterosexual guy and worth promoting or something.

Afterwards, he just said he thought it was about time and a
month later gave me an engagement ring after we’d been out for a Japanese meal.
A couple of years before, I’d have said something like ‘Hey! Isn’t this
something that we should have talked about before you went around telling
everybody? It’s meant to be a joint decision, you know! Who the fuck do you
think you are? Here! Take your ring and you know where you can put it!’

But I didn’t say any of those things. In fact, I didn’t kick
up any sort of fuss at all. Maybe I was just tired! Thinking about it now, it
had a sort of lazy inevitability about it. It was the opposite of romantic. It’s
like there was some sort of rule book that said when you’ve gone out with
someone for a certain amount of days, weeks, months or years, the next step is
to get engaged and then, finally, married. No joy, no spontaneity, just ‘this
is how it is’.

A lot of the girls I worked with had gone through this same
pattern. They’d had lots of boyfriends, then had one special boyfriend, then,
after a while, got engaged or got married. It just seemed like it was the
obvious thing to do, unless the boyfriend/fiancé turned out to be a mass
murderer or shot your dog something. Time always seemed to have a lot to do
with it. The longer it went on, the older you got and the more likely you were
to think about settling down.

A little voice often whispered to me that all of this was a
load of codswallop and that we’d all been brainwashed, but, like many others, I
ignored it.

Before I met Clive, I’d been with a guy called Simon, who I
was madly in love with. We’d actually lived together for just under two years
and it was fantastic. Then something – I’m not sure what it was – changed
between us. We’d started arguing over nothing and then after one particularly
massive blow-up, we decided to call it a day. I moved out and into the place
I’m living in now. It was a relief at the time.

The stupid thing was that I couldn’t remember what the
argument was about or why we’d got like that. It was such a shame. Maybe
there’s a certain amount of time some relationships are meant to last and then
it all starts to disintegrate. I don’t know.

But since I’ve been with Clive, there’s always been another
little voice at the back of my head (I have a lot of little voices. I haven’t
started giving them names yet) telling me that I went out with Clive because I
was on the rebound from Simon.

Now I’ve always thought that rebound stuff was terribly
immature and gives the impression of a lonely and needy person, who is so
messed up by a relationship failing that they grab anything that goes by. It’s
all to do with fear, I thought. Fear of not having a bf. Fear of being alone.
Fear of having no social life. Fear of what your friends and family might say
or think. I always felt pity for any of my friends that seemed to be in a
rebound relationship and never thought it would happen to me.

But maybe it did. Maybe I’m more in need of security than
I’d like to admit!

I check my watch (still plenty of time!), change into some
loose fitting jogging pants and a t-shirt and make myself a cup of
decaff
with some fake sugar stuff to make it palatable. It
still tastes like mud. I ate a lot of mud as a child, so I know what I’m
talking about.

I’ve seen people doing Tai Chi in parks and I’ve seen it on
the telly, but I’ve never tried it myself and I’m quite looking forward to
seeing what it’s like. Slow, I imagine.

I realise that this is the first time I’ve thought of Simon
in years. I couldn’t honestly say that I’m still in love with him, but I can’t
help smiling when I think about his rather crazy, erratic personality. He was
the complete opposite of Clive in almost every way and couldn’t keep his hands
off me, even in public. He was always touching, stroking and rubbing. He
jokingly said it was to keep me in a permanent state of semi-arousal and if
that was his intention, it certainly did the trick!

He’d worked as a graphic designer and ran his own small
company (only him), but I don’t think things had been going very well for him
for some time. Maybe that’s why we started to get ratty with each other. There
was an underlying stress that we were too young or too dim to understand or
appreciate.

But at least the Simon thing was all in the ‘now’. With
Clive, it’s all in the future and sometimes it feels like I’m on an express
train. I don’t know where it’s heading and it’s going too fast for me to get
off!

***

After two hours of Tai Chi, I walk down the corridor and it
feels like I’m walking on cotton wool, which is really weird. It was very
relaxing, but not relaxing like yoga classes where you feel like you’re going
to fall asleep at any moment! I felt really alert and wide awake the whole
time.

I asked the lady who took the session about using it as a
proper martial art. Self-defence and all of that. She said it was really
effective, but it takes about twelve years before you can use it in that way.
Oh well. Maybe I should have started it when I was nine or something!

I realised about half way through the Tai Chi session that I
was starting to get hungry. In fact, I was a bit worried that the instructor
could hear my tummy rumbling!

So I go back to my room and get changed for dinner. It seems
a bit silly to have a dress code for dinner in a place like this where you’re
meant to be chilling out, but I suppose their dining room has to be treated as
a restaurant like any other, so I’m not too put out. I check my mobile for
texts, but there’s nothing.

I put on my favourite dress, a lovely wrap-over number with
the belt tied at the side of the hip and huge pink and black camellia patterns
all over it. After sticking on enough makeup to show that I don’t care about
makeup, I take a look at myself in the mirror. It all looks fine. I’ve only
been here a day and I look better already! Or is it my imagination?

As I approach the dining room, I think for a moment that
someone’s died of too much lettuce and exercise and there’s a big crowd having
a look at the corpse, but it’s just people queuing outside the dining room,
obviously as hungry as I am!

I’m not usually antisocial, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able
to get a table to myself. Those hopes are, though, immediately dashed as I feel
a tap on my shoulder and turn to see Rebecca.

‘Do you mind if I join you? I want to hear all about your
bamboo massage with James!’

I don’t like to say it, but she looks amazing. She’s dressed
in the sort of clothes you might see in some fashion magazine and the jewellery
she’s wearing looks very expensive (of course it may be fake, but I wouldn’t
know).

We find a table by the window and she takes a quick look at
the menu and then puts it down on the table. I don’t understand how she can
choose something so quickly. Then I remember that she practically lives here,
so undoubtedly knows the whole thing off by heart. She’s probably on first name
terms with all of the kitchen staff by now and gives them tips on ingredients
and menu composition!