Back in the club Neil tries to make a start on ‘Can minds exist independently of matter?’ but finds it hard going. As far as he can determine, at this early stage, the mind/body problem provides you with a choice of three fundamental positions (three positions with many sub-positions of increasing complexity). You can believe that there is nothing but mind; you can believe there is nothing but body (or matter, or physical substance); or you can believe that both exist. He reads on, but with decreasing concentration: he keeps thinking of Doreen Babcock. Later, he sells £200 worth of GH.DYASIC.250 tablets to a man (a friend of Dave) who says he’s come down from London specially. The man asks, lowering his voice, if he can get this new Hungarian-manufactured human growth hormone that he’s read about in one of the underground magazines. Neil says he wouldn’t touch that Hungarian stuff but he can get him SOMABLOK. What’s that? The man says. It blocks somastatin: it’s the best, Neil avers, simply. I’m the only place you can find it in the UK, but it’s pricey. The man orders £500 worth.
That evening in the pub, The Golden Anchor, Doreen asks for a fizzy mineral water. Neil orders his usual vodka and tonic. Doreen studies the rubric on the bottle, checking the electrolytes and trace minerals. ‘I need more zinc,’ she says. Then she takes about nine pills, as far as Neil can count, glugging them down with swigs from the bottle.
‘Are you using gear?’ he asks, knowing the answer.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Do I look that freaky?’
‘What’s your stack?’
‘AQLASTERON.’
Neil winces. ‘That’s a monster. You take these unadulterated AAS products. You’re asking for trouble.’
‘AAS? AS, surely.’
‘Anabolic-Androgenic Steroids. That’s what they are. You know what anabolic means?’
‘Of course: muscle-building.’
‘You’re building muscle with synthetic testosterone. That’s where the androgenic comes in: “man-making”. You have to be careful. Men and women – all sorts of things start to happen.’
‘Well, it works.’
‘I can get you something better than AQLASTERON, something called TESTOMAX. No side effects.’
For the first time Doreen Babcock looks at him with genuine interest.
‘Cogito ergo sum. Wittgenstein: If a man says to me, looking at the sky, “I think it will rain, therefore I exist,” I do not understand him.’
Neil walks Doreen to her bus stop through the orange glare of the promenade lights. The glow makes Doreen’s skin look a jaundiced yellow, her acne spots like dark freckles. Neil pauses to use his inhaler.
‘Are those dermal patches?’ Neil points at the round sticking plaster on her calves. ‘I couldn’t help noticing.’
‘I’m injecting there,’ she says. Since their TESTOMAX conversation Doreen has opened up about her steroid cycle.
‘Site-specific fat burner?’
‘An oil.’
‘Jesus. You must be desperate.’
‘Yeah. It’s not working, either. I need to bulk my calves, fast – the oil seemed the only way.’
‘Lagging muscle group?’
Doreen nods. She seems close to tears, suddenly, as they walk on in silence. Neil makes a vow: I am going to save this girl from herself.
‘Cut out the oils,’ he says. ‘I’ve got this amazing fat burner: a gel.’
Neil boils up a thousand branded analgesics in a saucepan, just enough for the logo to disappear. Then he spreads them on a tea towel and rakes his fingers through them to speed the drying. The partial boiling takes off the pill’s industrial sheen and makes them look cruder, more home-made. Neil’s great revelation was the discovery that many bodybuilders are attracted by bad packaging. The true supplement searcher wants something that looks smuggled, contraband, under-the-counter: the more makeshift the packaging therefore the more authentically illicit and potent, so the formula goes. Neil prints out on his home-printing set: ‘TESTOMAX: BEISPIEL NUR ZU VERKAUFEN’, and sticks the label on a small, oblong, utterly plain, recycled-paper pillbox… He’ll get Doreen on to this stack tomorrow.
That night he lies in bed listening to his heartbeat through his stethoscope. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum-dum-dum-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Both his parents, he knows, when they were semi-pro bodybuilders in competition in the 1970s and ’80s, were regular anabolic steroid users. He has heard them extol the values of smuggled Mexican steroids and their astonishing cheapness – a vial of DECA for $2.75 (they used to inject their AAS quota in those days). He was born in 1984. A year before his mother won the NPC Junior USA championship. He sees the photographs every day when he enters the gym, sees his mother’s white smile as she holds the columned trophy aloft, sees also the perfect cross-striation on her biceps and thigh muscles. Tanya was ripped, peeled to perfection. He is the steroid progeny of two carefree steroid users and he knows this is the source of his asthma, his psoriasis, his allergies – and now the changing rhythm of his heart. He feels a rage build within him. He knows what this is, too, an anger peculiar to those who use supplements: ‘roid-rage’, they call it. He lets the roid-rage rinse through him for a while, then calms himself with the knowledge of all the good work he is doing down here in the south-east of England.
‘Gilbert Ryle argued coherently against the idea that the mind was a non-physical entity related in some way to the body. This position was stigmatized by him when he invented the concept of “the ghost in the machine”.’
Doreen is now on Neil’s regime – his stack. Four TESTOMAX, three times a day, two GH.DYASIX.250 three times a day, his MRPs, his site-specific fat-burner. He has squeezed two tubes of hair gel mixed with some horse liniment into a small jamjar and labelled it ‘DERMABLAST’.
In the gym he watches her rub the gel into her calves.
‘It’s hot,’ she says. ‘It burns. Brilliant.’
‘Careful you don’t get it in your eyes,’ he warns, ‘it can hurt like hell.’
She is truly grateful, she says, as she writes out the cheque for £346. She’s clean, he realizes: nothing toxic is going into her body any more – now all he has to do is to cajole her into eating properly. Mind over matter: Doreen Babcock is going to be his exemplary model.
The day is sunny and warmish but with a gusty breeze off the Channel that makes the small clouds hurry inland, the wide crescent of beach edging the bay mottled with moving shadows. Neil and Doreen find a hollow in the dunes that shelters them from the breeze and spread their travelling rug. Neil does not remove his jeans and t-shirt but Doreen strips off to reveal a small ultramarine bikini. Her body is the colour of varnished oak and probably just as hard, Neil thinks. He has seen so many powerful bodies in the gym that he’s no longer surprised by the grotesque distortion of her musculature; but he has also seen enough to realize that she is in formidable shape – the pecs, the delts, the abs, the bis and tris, the glutes, the traps, the hams, the rhombs, the lats and quads. Her balled shoulder muscles are the size of rugby balls. Her breasts have virtually disappeared, Neil notices, from all the testosterone she’s taken plus the muscle gain and non-stop fat burn. Her bikini top is more a symbolic gesture to a lost sexual characteristic than a device designed for holding, cupping and concealing.
Neil does not undress because the patch of eczema by his navel is the size of a beermat and is not responding to any of his powerful creams. He notices how relaxed Doreen is with her near nudity; how she settles down on the rug to apply her suntan lotion and, as she does so, she checks with her fingertips – prodding, squeezing – certain muscle groups – her thighs, her abdomen, her hamstrings – almost like a farmer assessing a prize steer. She and her body are at peace, he concludes with some bitterness, while he and his body are involved in a nasty little civil war.
Sometimes he feels he lives in a world of overwhelming materiality. He senses his chest tightening with pressure – Stress? Pollen? Doreen? – and takes a couple of squirts from his inhaler.
Trying to think of something else, trying to return to
the world of the mind, he asks Doreen a question.
‘Doreen. If I said to you, “I think it is going to rain, therefore I exist,” would you understand what I was saying?’
‘Of course – specially if you were lying there beside me.’
But Doreen is in an excited mood and doesn’t want to explore arcane aspects of Neil’s mind/body-problem problem. The TESTOMAX is working, she claims, really working. She has more energy; her bench presses have increased by 10 lbs in a week, she’s less tired after her workouts. She’s upped the time she spends on her calf muscles – more weights, more reps – and can boast a half-inch gain already. She stands and shows him. Clenching her lower right leg to reveal the two tensed plates of muscle, like separate frozen chicken breasts, one large, one smaller, under the beige, oiled carapace of her skin.
Lunch. Neil drinks a can of beer, eats a cheese and tomato sandwich. Doreen has a protein shake and three apples. She offers Neil one, but he tells her he is allergic to apples.
They go for a walk along the beach, Doreen walking on tiptoes the whole way, working on those lagging muscle groups in her calves. While they walk she tells him she is going to the States in ten days. She’s giving up her job in the bank: she’s entering a competition in Orlando, the ANBC Empire Classic.
‘Bit drastic, isn’t it?’ Neil says. ‘Won’t Barclays take you back?’
‘I’m not coming back – not right away – I’m thinking of turning pro,’ she says.
‘Oh. Right. I thought you might be thinking of that. Yeah… Congratulations.’
‘There’s only one problem,’ she confesses. ‘I need a new name. I can’t be a professional bodybuilder called Doreen Babcock.’
Neil knows what she’s asking. ‘Leave it to me,’ Neil says.
Neil spends that evening analysing and categorizing names of female bodybuilders. Certain key types emerge. The most popular, as far as he could determine, are what he would classify as: German, Swedish, Girl plus Girl, Trash plus Traditional, Solitaries, Armenian, Slavic, Alphabet Soup, Hooker, Alliterative, Italian, Home-on-the-Range and onomatopoeic. Or any combination of the above. On these principles he draws up some random selections for Doreen: Shona Dalburian, Sunrise Kruger, Maiayani, Vanessa-Anne April, Alamaba, Shirleen Simpson, Trixxxi Olafsen, Nyralene Kowalski, Skyye, Maggie Steelmaster, Omega Dubrovnik, Trish Malateste, Helga Gudrunsdottir, Ludmilla Francis, Yellow, Carrie-Mae Tuesday, Oklahoma Banks, Zonella Zay, Pearleen Gunther, and so on. He compiles a list of what he regards as a hundred acceptable names.
‘Opponents of Dualism never succeeded in giving a satisfactory account of the feeling we all have of personal identity. They could not account for the special relationship that exists between the elements that make up a person’s mind and that particular physical object which is that person’s body.’
‘And another thing,’ Doreen says, as they walk along the prom towards the restaurant, ‘my vascularity is better and I don’t get headaches.’
‘That’s a because TESTOMAX is a natural product,’ Neil improvises, ‘extracted from a plant, tibullus terrestris, that grows along the banks of the Black Sea.’
‘You could make a fortune,’ she says, ‘if you marketed this properly.’
Neil mentally lists the side effects of excessive steroid use in women bodybuilders: coarsening of the skin, acne, stretchmarks, roid-rage, deepening voice, hirsutism, clitoral enlargement, cholesterol increase, headaches, high blood pressure, kidney malfunction, water retention, stomach aches.
‘You risk kidney malfunction,’ he eventually says.
‘But,’ she says, ‘how do you gain serious muscle-mass, otherwise?’
‘Fair point.’
They are scrutinizing the menu in Zebulon, a new restaurant that has opened in the refurbished Grand Hotel. As far as Neil can tell, Zebulon generously offers food from at least seven different cuisines – Pacific Rim, straight Asian, Tex-Mex, English, US, Indian and Italian – and the odd idiosyncratic mix of several, best symbolized by the house sandwich: a bacon, egg and brie ciabatta. Tom Yum prawns with a lime and lemon grass salad sounds good, but he is worried about his creeping shellfish allergy. His eczema patch is the size of a side plate now. Goan chicken curry or the ‘Ultimate Nachos’ also tempt. Doreen is ready to order.
‘Does the chicken caesar salad have anchovies?’
‘Yes,’ says the waiter, who sounds Russian, ‘and you can have extra.’
‘Right. I’ll have a chicken caesar with extra anchovies but with no chicken, no croutons and no dressing.’
‘Ah, anchovies,’ Neil says. ‘More omega-3 fatty acids. Excellent.’
Neil orders steak and kidney pudding with a flamin’ salsa sauce on the side. He takes his list of names out of his pocket and slides it across the table towards her.
Neil walks Doreen across the carpark of Body’s East towards her car. She opens the door, turns and kisses him, full on the mouth. His arms go round her and his palms rest on her lats. It’s like hugging a wide-screen television. Even in her heels she’s seven inches shorter than he is. Their pose is awkward: she flattens her face on his chest, he rests his chin on the top of her head.
‘Can you hear it?’ he says. ‘My heartbeat’s irregular.’
She’s not listening. She raises her face to him. ‘Thank you, Neil,’ she says.
‘What for?’
‘Maggie Steelmaster.’
‘What do we see when we look at our fellow human beings? The bulk of their behaviour is as unpredictable as the weather. We intuit that they have mental lives – minds – of one sort or another but beyond that we arrive at perplexity.’
Before she leaves for the States Doreen – as a form of thank-you present – takes Neil to Glyndebourne to see Cosi fan Tutte. It is his first opera. Doreen, to his vague surprise, tells him she loves opera and Cosi is her favourite. Moreover, she seems familiar with the place – this theatre in a country estate – and knows what to do, what the form is. Neil learns that she usually comes to Glyndebourne with her father – in fact he has given up his ticket for Neil.
In the interval they sit on the lawn with their picnic, Doreen removing the bread from her smoked salmon sandwiches, allowing herself a rare sip or two of Neil’s champagne. She has been recently on the sunbed and her even, dense pro-tan is immaculate. Neil tries to imagine her on stage in her micro-kini, ripped and pumped, depilated, dehydrated, oiled and slippery with collagen posing oil, and feels a rare sexual quickening. He reaches for her hand.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ he says.
She’s not listening, her mind’s on something else. ‘Neil,’ she says, ‘What’s your opinion about beef plasma?’
‘For some thinkers, the mind is more confidently and immediately known than anything that is material. If this view is followed it is natural to begin to become sceptical about the very existence of the material world.’
‘It seems incredible,’ Doreen writes two weeks later, ‘but the fact that I came third in Orlando means I now have a sponsor – Busta-Tech. I even have a car! I told the people at Busta-Tech about TESTOMAX – so expect a call! I couldn’t have done this without you, Neil (and TESTOMAX!). By the way can you send me some more? If I get a top ten in Ms Olympia I’ll be staying on here for a year or so. I’m frying my calves in the gym and it’s working, it’s really working. Lotsa luv, Maggie.’
Neil’s tutor, Francis Parkman, hands him back his essay and compliments him on it. Then asks him if he’d like a drink. They stroll across the near-empty campus of Sussex University towards the students’ union. As part of his Open University degree Neil is spending a few days at a regional centre meeting tutors and attending seminars. Parkman suggests that he applies to do a degree at the university itself. Neil is flattered but seems unsure. Think about it, Parkman suggests, he’s confident something could be sorted out.
In the union bar Parkman brings their drinks over.
‘So,’ Parkman says, raising his pint in a toast, ‘minds can exist inde
pendently of matter.’
‘Yes,’ Neil says. ‘And matter can exist independently of minds. I see it every day, believe me.’
‘So you’re a Dualist.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Well, you arrived at a conclusion and it was a well-argued essay,’ Parkman says. ‘What made you come up with the concept of the placebo?’
Neil tries not to think of Maggie Steelmaster. Of Doreen Babcock turned Maggie Steelmaster. ‘My parents run a gym,’ he says. ‘It was just something that occurred to me.’
The job, as the men promised, only takes a day. Neil pays for it himself so his parents have no complaint – but they still can’t see what the fuss is about. Neil looks up at the new sign: the same colours – but finally correct. That sign has bugged him for years: he has minded about that sign. Now the gas-flame-blue neon of ‘Bodies East’ is shimmeringly reflected in the rain-pocked, glossy black puddles of the carpark. One problem solved, at last.
The Pigeon
‘You ask me: what is life? That is like asking: what is a carrot?
A carrot is a carrot and that’s all there is to it.’
Anton Chekhov
He wakes up at 6.17 a.m. because of the pressure on his bladder and reaches under the bed for the pot. He sits on the edge of the bed and raises the hem of his nightshirt and pisses without standing up – like an old, sick man, he thinks. This summer they would install a proper lavatory, one that flushed, and they would build the guest house for the men to sleep in: the women could stay in the main house. How civilized.
He dresses, pulling on the clothes he discarded on the floor the previous night. Sometimes an old shirt is more comfortable than a fresh, new one, he thinks. We’re like animals, we prefer our own familiar smells. He stands in front of the looking glass and runs a comb through his hair and his beard. His hair seems to be thinning and he wonders for a moment if that could be a new symptom of his illness. The thought of becoming bald fills him with horror. He is only thirty-four, in God’s name, yet at times he looks and feels twice that age. How handsome he was at twenty! How did that young, burly peasant lad turn into a querulous, pernickety invalid? His own father has ten times more energy.