Where There's Smoke

She left Clive at King’s Cross and caught a tube to the health club. Although it wasn’t far from her flat, she hadn’t been since finding out she was pregnant; partly because she’d had other things on her mind, partly because she didn’t want to subject the delicate foetus to her usual strenuous workout. But the habit of regular exercise was hard to break. She had packed her swimsuit that morning, intending to start a new regime. Now, though, all she wanted to do was go home and lock herself in her flat. Which was all the more reason not to.

The health-club gymnasium was busy with the usual post-work crowd. Kate changed into her black one-piece costume and looked down at her stomach. She wasn’t showing yet, and she put her bloated feeling down to lack of exercise and imagination. Eager now, she went downstairs into the low basement that housed the club’s swimming pool.

Inside, the air was warm and moist, like a greenhouse. A few other swimmers were already in the pool, performing their laps with disciplined regularity. Obeying the sign not to dive, Kate lowered herself into the water. It was blood warm. She felt it wrap around her, comforting, and on impulse she closed her eyes and lowered her head below the surface.

The external world ceased. She let herself sink, giving herself up to the water. There was a roaring in her ears, like listening to the seashells she had found on beaches as a little girl. Through it came the deep, steady pulse of her heart. Womb music. This is what it’s like inside me. We’re hearing the same sounds.

Lulled by the sensual, sensory deprivation, she floated, suspended, until a message of discomfort intruded. Her lungs pulled for air, and for an instant Kate felt an impulse to draw a breath and let the water engulf her inside as well as out. It was gone almost immediately. Opening her eyes, she kicked through the amniotic warmth for the surface.

She swam thirty laps before climbing out. Her body ached with the afterglow of exertion as she showered, then dressed and dried her hair. Luxuriating in the feeling, she contemplated getting a takeaway on her way home. The exercise had made her hungry, but reduced her inclination to cook. By the time she came out of the changing room she had decided to indulge herself fully and eat out. She was dimly aware that the attendant on the reception desk gave her a strange look as she left, but was too preoccupied over whether to go for Italian or Chinese to pay much attention.

The club took up most of the first two floors, and part of the basement, of a converted warehouse. Its entrance on the ground floor was a doorway set between a fruit shop and a chemist’s. They had been open when she arrived, but both were closed now, with steel security shutters pulled down over their windows. As Kate came out, still considering where to eat, she realised that there was something different about them. It was a second or two before she understood that the grey metal was flecked with specks of white.

She stopped. More aware now, she noticed the scraps of paper specking the pavement in front of the shops. She looked back at the door to the club. The steel sheet that covered it had fresh scratches gouged in its surface, as though something had been scraped off.

Kate looked along the length of the other shops, but there was nothing to indicate that anything had ever been pasted onto them. She became conscious of a pain in her hands. Her nails were digging into the palms of her clenched fists. She opened them, turning away from the mottled shutters that didn’t, after all, prove anything.

Her appetite had vanished. Intending to go home, she went to cross the road. A bus shelter stood on the other side, opposite the entrance to the club. She had passed it on her way in, walked right by without giving it a glance. Now, though, it was directly facing her. The posters almost covered it.

During the next two days, it seemed that Kate saw the poster wherever she went. Her features smiled out from on top of the fat woman’s body all over the city. Sometimes there would be only one, slapped in a prominent position in the middle of a wall or window. At others there would be a cluster. Coming up from Tottenham Court Road tube station she saw a line of them running parallel to the escalators, raggedly pasted between and over the everyday advertisements. Most had been partially ripped off, but on some her face or name still remained. Kate ducked her head and stared at her feet as the escalator carried her past them. At the top she stumbled when she stepped off and saw one stuck to the floor. It was dirty and scuffed from the hundreds of feet that had trampled it, but still recognisable. KATE POWELL IS A MURDER it said, before a missing corner obliterated the rest of the message. Buffeted by the other people coming off the escalator, Kate walked over it.