GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

WILL HALL

‘The Muffin Man’

WE WERE PERFORMING SO BADLY my company wanted to control what we ate for three months.

‘Is that legal?’ asked Vanessa when I told her.

‘It’s voluntary,’ I said. ‘I’m going to say no.’

I was still renting in Zone 3 London, still with Vanessa, still selling biometric security solutions for MindPrint. Things like retina scanners, I told strangers at the Brixton house parties Vanessa made me go to. But they never actually trusted me with retina scanners. I was in the VoicePrint division, the lowest rung. We sold voice recognition that was less reliable than most smartphone technology and, just for example, didn’t work if you had a cold. We sometimes acted as customer support and in winter I spent hours pacifying angry homeowners, locked outside their houses and demanding partial refunds in funny nasal voices.

I read Vanessa the email explaining the diet control scheme at her flat, acting like I was offended and planning to quit. I told her a nutrition consultancy called Halo was behind it. My laptop froze and I bashed the touchpad while giving dramatic summaries like, ‘We’re being treated like children so the managers can feel like they’re innovating and the nutritionists can make money.’

Vanessa sat down opposite me. She stretched a leg under the table and used her toes to pluck my inner thigh hairs. She had long legs. It was the kind of childish, undercutting thing she did to make me see that I was being a diva. I grabbed her foot before she could pull it away and tugged, so that she slid down in her chair and squealed.

When I didn’t let go Vanessa somehow folded her body below the table, swivelled beneath it and resurfaced on my side with a determined smile. Vanessa was able to do this because she was a part-time personal trainer whose feats of flexibility and core strength received hundreds-of-thousands of TikTok views. She called herself a content creator. It was roughly a year since I was last able to secretly think this was a self-important term, because it was roughly a year since she started making more money than me.

‘I think I worked with Halo once,’ she said, using me to climb up from under the table.

‘They want to analyse our gut biomes and how our blood responds to sugar and fat,’ I said, craning my neck over her contorted body to read the email. ‘Does that make any sense to you?’

‘A little,’ said Vanessa. ‘Did you say you’ll get a bigger bonus if you tell them yes?’

‘We get bespoke diets,’ I continued, engrossed in the email now. I was too angry to read it properly before. ‘They’ll deliver meals for a full business quarter. Breakfast, lunch, even dinner to take home. Weekends we can eat what we like.’

‘So we can start flat-hunting if you say yes?’ Vanessa slid into my lap, her arms around my neck.

‘If I hit my targets,’ I said, seeing the opportunity now.

We’d talked about buying somewhere together, even though I didn’t have the money. Sometimes Vanessa was enthusiastic and life seemed easier. Other times she was colder and indifferent and the fact I was nearly thirty whistled up from the part of my brain I paid less attention to.

I went on with the email, ‘We will be more focused, more productive. Our diets will be nearly perfect.’

‘It doesn’t sound too bad,’ said Vanessa. ‘Maybe it doesn’t sound too bad,’ I said.

—-

MindPrint said they’d increase our quarterly bonuses by fifty percent if we signed up to Halo’s diet management scheme and hit our targets. Every member of my team agreed except one. Her name was Meryl. She sat next to me and people said she was anti-vax. But first Halo wanted samples. I got into work one Tuesday morning to find a plain muffin waiting on my desk. It was in a sealed plastic bag within another sealed bag with biohazard and barcode stickers and a clear screw lid container.

‘So that’s today?’ I said to Ruben, who sat across from me. He had a small cotton ball taped to the inner side of his elbow. He said I wasn’t allowed to eat the muffin until I went down the hall and saw Dr Valdes, our Halo rep.

‘I just finished mine,’ Ruben went on. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers over his belly. ‘And now we play the waiting game.’

—-

Dr Valdes was using a meeting room I later didn’t remember having any windows.

‘The average human adult makes forty-thousand decisions per day,’ he told me as the nurse wiped something cold over my inner elbow.

‘We’d like to decide three of those for you, the most important ones,’ Dr Valdes continued. ‘Important because if you don’t make them, you die.’

The nurse’s needle slid beneath my skin as Dr Valdes finished the thought, ‘Deciding what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’

They took two small test tubes of blood. Fat shimmering worms flopped about at the corners of my eyes afterwards. They asked If I wanted to sit for a while until I was ready to return to work. I said no and, when I got back to my desk, found the office was full, keyboards clacking, people pacing about the room, talking into headsets. With the light-headedness and the cross-chatter and the lack of food, I had to dig my fingernails into my knees for five minutes and pray no one spoke to me. Then I opened the bag and took out the muffin and the container. The muffin was dense and tasted like Play-Doh.

There were only eight salespeople in the VoicePrint division but we had three Bens.

Then there was Ruben, which sounds like if our marketing team rebranded the name Ben. Meryl worked in-office Tuesdays to Thursdays and our team leader George, who once did a stand-up comedy course, bitched about her Mondays and Fridays. Sometimes he printed out her Instagram posts, shots of mundane home-cooked meals or arts and crafts projects. He’d stick them to the whiteboard ranking us by monthly sales performance. Next to the print-outs he’d leave a tally chart with several untitled columns so that Meryl would see she had been judged without knowing exactly how. If you didn’t fill in the tally chart, George asked if everything was alright at home and as you stared at your screen and pretended to ignore him, you had this heart-stopping feeling everyone else was exchanging looks and private messages about you.

‘What’s all the plastic for?’ asked Meryl.

I was halfway through my muffin, pretending not to hear.

‘To do your sample you have to use the bathroom two floors up,’ said Ruben over his monitor. ‘There’s another nurse who takes them straight from you coming out. She’s nice.’

‘What kind of sample?’ asked Meryl.

I continued to ignore her but after a few moments she said, ‘Oh god, no.’

‘Grow up, Meryl,’ said Ruben. ‘Your gut microbiome is your body’s second brain. You need to know how it thinks.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Meryl, packing up her desk.

‘The nurse takes the samples from us right outside the bathroom,’ I said, defensively.

‘I’m going to work in the lounge,’ said Meryl. She turned to Ruben, ‘Also, don’t tell me to grow up when you just shit in a tub at work for more money.’

—-

That night I phoned Vanessa, my phone on speaker because I was playing online poker.

As it rang I wondered how good you had to be to turn professional. Vanessa didn’t pick up. I went all in on a pair of twos because peak Kaká wore No.22 at Milan. The phone rang out and Vanessa messaged, We’re having drinks and it’s loud. Can we just text?

She was in Barcelona, filming. That’s ok, I wrote back. Have fun.

I lost the hand and my monthly savings. I threw my phone onto the sofa across the room, so that I wasn’t tempted to keep playing. I pulled out my laptop and started watching poker tutorials on YouTube.

I knew a crushing wave of self-hate would come if I didn’t go to the gym or do something productive but I did neither of these things. I wasted another evening. I managed to ride out the feeling without resorting to watching porn or having the locks on my front door changed, a tendency of mine I couldn’t explain if you put a gun to my head. All I can say is that I got this random urge in moments where I felt like a loser, like my stomach had been melon-bowled.

The test results came back next Wednesday. Everyone received someone else’s blood work. This was technically a serious data breach and I felt someone should have faced major legal action. But I think Halo offered a discount. MindPrint apologised and raised our participation reward so everyone was happy.

When I opened my inbox that afternoon, there was already a follow-up from Halo titled, IMPORTANT: DO NOT OPEN PREVIOUS EMAIL. I read the previous email. The results were for Margot, probably the best salesperson in our team. She could do impressive things like control the amount of alcohol she drank at client lunches or work events and usually topped the leaderboard, where after good months I finished mid-table. After bad months I didn’t and George roasted me in ways that were funny but also blatant attempts to test stand-up material.

Reading Margot’s results was scary and then exciting and then boring when I saw how much effort it would take to understand them so I decided to do some actual work. We were two weeks into the business quarter and I hadn’t sold anything. I closed the email and immediately became distracted again. George had posted something on our work messaging platform, the channel named ‘Just a bit of Fun’. It was a news story titled, The Best Foods to Boost Testosterone. I noticed a message beneath it @ing me and my ears went a little hot. I asked Meryl if she knew what this was about.

‘George got yours,’ she said.

‘My what?’

‘Your test results.’

‘So what?’

‘You have low testosterone.’

‘Low what?’

‘Below average testosterone.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘George started a group chat across the whole office and everyone sent screenshots of their emails to compare.’

I took out my phone to see George had indeed started a group chat. He’d named it T-Pain and the avatar was a picture of me squinting, zoomed in so that it looked like my face was pressed up against a porthole. There were 47 messages, most of them reaction gifs.

‘I didn’t know they tested for that,’ I said.

‘Testosterone affects metabolism and energy levels,’ said Ruben, leaning sideways, speaking into the gap between our monitors.

‘For what it’s worth,’ said Meryl, ‘I think you should make a formal complaint.’

‘Course you would,’ I said, scowling at her without really knowing why.

I sulked for the rest of the day and after work I called the 24-hour locksmith guy. When he arrived he looked at me warily and said, ‘Was I here before recently?’

I nodded and smiled and said, ‘I need to be less careless.’

—-

The next day our first Halo meals arrived.

‘What’s for breakfast?’ asked Ruben as I opened my box.

‘This must be a mistake,’ I said.

Breakfast was an apple. The accompanying note read, Pro tip: Just eat the skin. That’s where all the good stuff is! There was also a shot of olive oil, some vitamin tablets and a small bottle I hoped was some kind of protein shake but turned out to be kefir.

Vanessa was back that Friday but we had to go play crazy golf with her friends on Sunday. The venue was below street level in what used to be a carpark. Vanessa was late. I didn’t know any of her friends well so I drank up. They were mostly content creators or their videographers. I wanted to seem more authentic than they were so I complained about the lack of natural lighting even though I liked the casino vibe. The guy working there invited us to do joke poses with the putters while he took pictures for social media. Someone pretended theirs was a microphone. A couple others did a sword duel. Vanessa arrived as I clamped the putter between my thighs like a boner.

‘What do they make you eat, say, for dinner?’ Luke asked me later at the bar. He shot and edited Vanessa’s videos sometimes. I was a week into the Halo scheme and had been throwing the dinners away when I got home.

‘Mostly grilled chicken and vegetables,’ I told him.

I wanted to kill the conversation because Vanessa sometimes called Luke her work-husband in my presence. Also he was just out of a long-term relationship and Vanessa was trying weirdly hard to find him a new girlfriend. It gave her opportunities to compliment him in social settings.

‘We need to find Luke someone who won’t take advantage of his pure-hearted nature,’ she would say.

I ordered a Negroni just to act disappointed when they said they didn’t do them. Luke ordered a pale ale.

‘You know they’re swimming with oestrogen?’ I told him.

‘I think that’s a myth,’ he said.

The ciders I drank for the rest of the day went down like apple juice. I made a few through-the-legs putts and some unkind comments about Vanessa’s friends and after we finished asked, ‘Where next?’

Everyone said they needed an early night. Vanessa didn’t want to stay out with me either so I texted workmates and old friends from school I hadn’t seen in years. I wanted to know what everyone was doing.

The next day my head and stomach pulsed and my skin felt sweaty and dry at the same time. Everyone else at work seemed to move at x1.5 speed, like they had a plan. Ruben looked alert and had cheekbones. Even worse he’d made a sale, meaning only me and Meryl had done nothing in Q1 so far.

I decided to quit drinking for the rest of the study and become a more serious person. For dinner I ate what Halo said I needed. Stuff like black lentils, cauliflower and mushrooms, with only ginger, garlic and extra virgin olive oil for flavour, overly aware of my own chewing as I ate it.

I went to the gym more, too. I even enjoyed training legs because of the incline leg press machine. It was a machine that required a leap of faith because you could load serious weight onto this thing. It seemed all it would take was for the rails’ stopping mechanism to malfunction while your feet were off the plate and splat. I became addicted to the relief I felt, this unloosening knot I didn’t know I carried in my chest, every time it didn’t happen.

Payday was next week. I took Vanessa out for dinner the following Saturday, a way of saying sorry if I embarrassed her at crazy golf.

‘Do you think you’ll hit your targets?’ Vanessa asked after we ordered.

I made a face that said, Who do you think you’re talking to? Then I waved the waiter back and asked for more tap water while Vanessa smiled at me in an unbridled way. Growing up, her parents rented. She told me this when she was drunk and it was just us two. It meant they moved often, forcing Vanessa to leave behind friends just as she was becoming popular.

‘What is it now, three weeks?’ she asked when the waiter brought my water.

I nodded even though it was just under two weeks since I stopped drinking. I told her I‘d lost three pounds. She raised both eyebrows, impressed. I had impressed her.

‘You look good,’ Vanessa said and wrinkled her nose, leaning in like we were a team. When Vanessa wrinkled her nose and leaned in like we were a team, I always felt something melting through my ribcage. Later we stumbled through her bedroom door and onto the bed, calves tangled, tops already off, mouths and chests flushed where they pressed together.

—-

The next week I made three sales. I sold home security to a tech start-up co-founder called Felix whose London neighbourhood was, in his words, stuck in that awkward mid-gentrification phase. I sold to a vape store owner in Shadwell and a scratch-card winner who’d bought a big house in Basildon. I took their bank details and said ‘Have a nice day,’ and for a fraction of a second genuinely felt like I was protecting them.

Dr Valdes asked how I was feeling at my mid-study check-up.

‘I have more energy,’ I said.

By then this was true. By then I wasn’t sweating for no reason as often. My lunches at this point were so wholesome I experienced an identity shift. They had names to make them sound more substantial than they were. I ate loaded sweet potatoes and hearty bean and kale stews, and I imagined Vanessa and myself in bright-coloured jumpers, like young couples you see on banking ads, painting our new home.

‘That’s what we like to hear,’ said Dr Valdes.

‘I’m finding it easier to talk to customers over the phone,’ I said.

‘An important part of what you do!’

‘I’m on a streak. I used to read from a script but now I don’t need it. I improv everything. I actually like speaking to the customers, asking about their lives, and I think because I won't be renting much longer I've got more time for the ones who moan about being locked out of the million-pound properties they own.’

Dr Valdes stood up to tell me the appointment was over.

‘Kyle, I love it,’ he said, ‘but save something for your therapist!’

—-

Vanessa stayed over that week and I showed her a video I found from one of George’s stand-up gigs.

‘Will I find it funny?’ Vanessa asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not like how you think.’

George had bragged about an upcoming performance and never mentioned it again. This was unlike George, so I went looking for a review or anyone talking about it on Twitter. I looked three separate times. What I found was the holy grail of workplace takedowns.

‘I can’t hear what he’s saying,’ said Vanessa.

The video was filmed by someone on a stag do, judging by the voices and t-shirts around them. The venue was small and dark, the stage basically a step, the crowd in touching distance of George.

‘Just keep watching,’ I said.

When George noticed he was being filmed, he looked into the camera twice. He turned away as if straining not to look into it a third time.

‘He seems nervous,’ said Vanessa.

George had a stack of papers on a stool in the middle of the stage. Whenever he lost his place, which was often, he’d flick through them and launch into another joke about climate change activists.

‘It’s about to get good,’ I said, sensing Vanessa’s muted reaction.

The camera panned down and left, just as one of the blokes on the stag snatched the notes off George’s stool as he was looking away. When George eventually noticed the notes were gone, he froze. He began stuttering. He took out his phone, his thumbs working frantically, scrolling, all the while saying, ‘Just a sec,’ to the audience and apologising. The stag party heckled him. One of them began reading George's own jokes back to him from the notes they’d taken. George made the mistake of asking what he did for a living.

‘I’m a shit stand-up,’ the bloke said. ‘Listen.’

They read out more of George’s material and the audience laughed and George stood up on stage, struggling to talk over the laughter.

‘Poor him,’ said Vanessa.

‘He’s a dickhead,’ I said. ‘If it makes you feel better.’

‘I think I’d dislike the work version of you,’ she said.

She said it playfully, smiling. But then her eyes shifted, like she was following the thought somewhere.

—-

A critical bug in the latest VoicePrint update led to a wave of refunds, wiping out virtually all our sales that quarter. The knot in my chest came back.

‘How will this affect our bonuses?’ asked Meryl in the team meeting and because it was Meryl, George rolled his eyes.

‘I assume you’re asking out of curiosity,’ he said. Half the room sniggered.

‘But seriously,’ said Margot, ‘our bonuses aren’t affected, right? This wasn’t our fault.’

‘Leave it with me,’ said George.

We left it with George. A week later there was an email from HR titled, Bonuses: A Rethink. The email told us that, as stated in our contract, refunded sales do not count toward targets. Nonetheless, it continued, rewarding performance is central to MindPrint’s ethos. As such, they would implement a tiered reward scheme to recognise sales affected by the bug. Prizes ranged from a Mediterranean cruise to Amazon vouchers.

I took it out on George and shared the video around the office via well-placed private messages. For a few days the jokes flying around at his expense improved the mood. Then we saw how stressed and sad he was, this public humiliation having chased him into another part of his life, preventing him from ever really being able to talk about his comedy ambitions again.

With the weight loss from the experiment, loose skin all over his face gathered in folds. We eased off. He looked too much like a pug.

I still ate the Halo meals. By this point I enjoyed feeling hungry, the liberating emptiness.

It confirmed I was becoming better than I was before. By then I was someone who went to the gym before work, showing up so early it was often just me and this moon-faced teenager there. I rarely saw him use any equipment. He liked to potter around between the benches and machines, shuffling into conversational range with older men, lingering a while and wandering off when they ignored him. I sometimes had fantasies about being nice to him.

Vanessa was away for work again. We spoke over WhatsApp and took turns ending conversations by forgetting to respond to each other’s latest message, usually after talk became aimless and uninteresting. I’d send property listings, just to gauge her mindset. One time I did this she sent back an eggplant emoji, then a follow-up saying, Sorry didn’t mean to send that to you.

—-

Eventually George found out it was me who shared the video around. I came in late one morning and there was something for me on the whiteboard. Instantly I got the impression it would ruin my day. Ruben was the only person not looking at me, covertly or otherwise.

Everyone else was patting me on the head with their smiles, not condoning what was on the whiteboard but feeding with joy on the drama all the same.

I tried acting natural, moving toward the whiteboard. Beside the sales rankings where I was currently third, below the Glengarry Glen Ross quote mistakenly written in permanent marker pen, was a picture of Vanessa. It wasn’t an Instagram post promoting gymwear or swimwear. It wasn’t photoshopped in an explicit or degrading way. It was just a picture from our first holiday together. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean, which was exactly the point.

George watched me, leaning back in his chair.

‘You’re late,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said, taking down the picture.

‘Any reason?’

‘Did you do this?’

‘Be on time in future.’

—-

I’d booked off Friday and Monday for a long weekend with Vanessa. She took the news about the bonus well. She tried to make me feel better. I didn’t tell her about the picture so it squatted over my brain and I spoiled the four days. We went to Sky Garden and quickly left because I said I had a headache from the warmth and humidity. We drank non-alcoholic peach breeze coolers at a rooftop bar over lunch and I complained about the prices. Laying in bed, her arm across me, I said I couldn’t sleep. I peeled her arm away and went into her living room to pickle my brain with YouTube videos about DIY projects, on some level pretending I was a homeowner.

—-

On Tuesday the picture of Vanessa was back up on the whiteboard. This time, there was a tally chart with two untitled columns beside it, nearly all the marks in the left-hand side. I took it down again and George didn’t even look up. I think he’d done it on Friday and forgot about it over the weekend. Halo decided breakfast should be Greek yoghurt with pumpkin seeds and walnuts, all chopped and roasted. Halfway through I noticed I was eating way more quietly than usual.

‘You should speak to HR,’ Meryl said.

‘Did you ever try that before?’ I said.

‘They couldn’t do anything but they’ll have to now. George’s unhinged lately.’

I looked at her. She felt like an ally in that moment and I felt bad for spreading the anti-vax rumour.

—-

Jess from HR left me in a room by myself for fifteen minutes after I explained what happened. Eventually she brought in an Australian guy with glasses whose role I understood was administrative and vaguely senior. He carried a folder and made me explain everything again.

When I was done he asked if I’d contacted an employment lawyer. I said no. He asked other questions that made me feel unprepared.

Then he said, ‘I’d like to get a sense of your emotional state. It’s for our records. It’s important we have a sense of your emotional state.’

I said I felt OK.

‘I see in my notes that you’ve been feeling more energetic lately,’ he said.

I nodded, a bit confused.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘And you’ve found it easier to have more natural conversations with clients over the phone?’

‘Did you get this from Dr Valdes?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Your sales have exploded this quarter,’ he said, flicking through his folder. ‘These numbers are meteoric.’

‘Most of it had to be refunded,’ I said.

He looked up and smiled and said, ‘MindPrint has actually decided to honour refunded sales in select cases. It’s something we planned to speak to you about.’

‘Is this so I don’t complain?’

He looked almost irritated.

‘It’s an unrelated update,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like to know, while we were on the subject of your wellness.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome,’ he said, smiling again. ‘As for what you’ve told us today, we’ll investigate. Leave it with us.’

He shut his folder. A couple weeks later George apologised and took some time off. I got an email from HR titled, ‘Next Steps’. Option A was to accept the apology and move on. Option B was long and complicated and required a written statement. I’d numbed on the whole thing by then. I’d picked up on a slight wariness while interacting with colleagues, too. I chose Option A and fifteen minutes later Jess sent me a separate email with information about my bonus.

—-

We celebrated the end of the Halo study with a work meal at Bulut Grill. This was maybe the worst night of my life. Years later I described it to a therapist and successfully got them to wince at the two key moments, the second of which I still can’t laugh about.

There were about a dozen of us. As we sat down George joked about only eating bread and red meat for the next month. As he ordered, we realised he wasn’t actually joking. Our drinks came and he raised his glass and shouted, ‘Fuck Halo.’

I planned not to drink but someone ordered Cobras for the table. The sourness and the small bubbles rolling over my tongue were like micro-shocks, nice and lively. My brain slowed down. My heart slowed down. We over-ordered because we were off our diets and everything was on George’s company card. The waiters couldn’t fit it all on the table, bread, meat and minimal vegetables, everything covered with glistening oil, black char and salt. I cornered Ruben about the picture of Vanessa.

‘Just tell me,’ I said. ‘I think I already know, so just tell me.’

‘What am I supposed to tell you?’

‘You were voting on whether you would, right?’

‘Would what?’

‘You want me to say it?’

Ruben made a face and said, ‘Sounds like a toxic thought, mate.’

‘Printing out a picture of a woman you don’t know isn’t toxic?’

Ruben tried and failed to join another conversation.

‘So what was the subject?’ I asked.

‘Relationships where one partner is significantly better looking than the other.’

He sighed as he said it. I don’t know if he was trying to be obnoxious.

‘Meaning what?’ I said.

‘Well, that’s what I thought we were voting on.’

‘As in, whether one of us is better looking?’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Which one of us?’

Ruben picked up his menu, scraping the barrel for a distraction now. I snatched it away.

‘Which of you do you think?’ he said.

After this I sulked for a bit and started trying to goad George, who had been racing the pints down since lunch. I used the basic tactics, asking him to tell us a joke, telling him he looked like a pug. He took something out from his wallet, another photo of Vanessa, folded up. Everyone else pretended not to see.

‘Shall we get you another bonus?’ he said, waving the print-out.

You could say my reaction was delayed. Many drinks later, after we’d eaten, I threw a spoon that caught George on the ear and clattered off the table edge. He winced and turned to look at me. I hadn’t realised how pale he’d gone, how woozy he looked. His eyes were glazed and small, scanning the table, his face all confused.

I ordered tequila shots for everyone and did mine quickly enough to watch George drink his. He stood up seconds after knocking it back and headed for the toilets, stumbling, hips bumping into the backs of those who didn’t move. After enough time passed that no one would notice, I followed him.

Two kitchen workers leaned against opposing walls outside the toilets, both tall with shaved heads, drinking water from protein shakers. They glared as George stumbled between them, bouncing off the walls and into a cubicle just beyond the wedged-open door to the men’s room. George left his cubicle ajar, so I was able to shove it open when I got there. I had no plan, just some hazy urge to get the picture of Vanessa. The kitchen workers in the corridor looked at me. I looked into the cubicle. George, sitting on the toilet, had his hands pushed against the cubicle walls, straining to avoid spilling onto the floor.

‘Mate,’ he said, ‘give me a hand.’

The first hints of the smell only hit me after he spoke. He sounded half-conscious. A saliva strand hung from his lip.

‘I shouldn’t have done lamb,’ he said, shaking his head weakly. ‘I wasn’t ready for lamb.’

I took in the smell as something concrete, definable. Then I realised with horror that he hadn’t lifted the toilet lid first. The observation made me physically jump.

‘What is it?’ said one of the guys out in the hall.

I left the door open and, passing the kitchen workers, said, ‘I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.’

‘What is it?’

Both stepped toward the cubicle.

‘I wouldn’t go in there,’ I said.

As I slipped away toward the exit, I heard them yell and laugh like hyenas, so loud nearly all the other people in the restaurant looked up.

—-

Halfway home I realised I’d taken the wrong keys out with me, the ones from before I last had the locks changed. I rang the locksmith a few times but it was past midnight. The third time it went straight to voicemail. Minutes later he messaged, Are you kidding?

Vanessa’s text said not to come over but I was already across the street from her building, looking up at her window to see if she was awake. I was cold and thirsty, sobering up. I stood on the curb where the bus left me and saw Vanessa’s bedroom light come on. I saw a silhouette move behind her curtain, then another. Then she called me.

‘Where are you?’ she said.

‘I locked myself out,’ I said.

She asked where I was again, anxious to know.

‘Outside yours,’ I said.

She went silent. I heard her move. Another window in her flat lit up. Out in the street was total stillness and quiet apart from the hum of the street lamp dropping pale cold light down on me. Up above, from Vanessa’s flat, shone this warm coffee-foam glow through the curtains and the windows and I was certain then that two silhouettes passed behind them. I told her again that I was outside.

‘You can’t stay over,’ she said. Her voice trembled.

‘Alright then,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, Kyle,’ she said. ‘Do you have somewhere else to go?’

I had an idea where I might go but didn’t tell her. I just stood there, drowned in what I was feeling, what everything added up to, the lights, the shadows. The anxiety in Vanessa’s voice when she told me I couldn’t come up. The second silhouette, who I pictured patiently waiting for Vanessa to get off the phone, able to afford patience because they had everything I wanted. All this stuff works like chewing gum inside your head, thoughts gumming up rather than gliding blissfully by. And you can’t spit it out, the chewing gum. You have to taste it, even as it slowly creates the kind of gut-level sadness that makes actual physical hunger seem cheap and irrelevant.

—-

I got to the gym in the small hours. It was eerie being there completely alone. I bought a milkshake with forty-five grams of protein from the vending machine and took it down to the weights room. In the mirror, under the white batten lights that switched on as I walked beneath them, I looked like a skeleton.

The room with the massage chairs was locked so I tried a bench but it was too short. I ended up in the incline leg press machine, loaded with about 180 kg of weight plates that I thought about removing before deciding I was too tired. I slept with my back on the padded seat, my legs sprawled under the carriage. I had a sex dream involving what I think was a faceless hybrid of Vanessa and other ex-girlfriends. We were in a tower. Down below people threw glass bottles at the stone walls but we were too high up for them to see us or speak to us.

A few hours later I woke to see the moon-faced kid looking down at me, blankly.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Are you using this?’

He held a tricep rope out to me. I rubbed my eyes. I tried to figure out if he was mocking me somehow.

'‘If I was using it, I’d be using it,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t I?’

He put the rope back down on the floor, as if whatever he wanted it for no longer mattered, and he waddled away, leaving me alone again, sitting under a machine I on some level worried might kill me but had slept in anyway, with my jacket spread over my lap to hide an erection.

WILL HALL is a sports writer and editor based in London. He won the 2023 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize.