The Seven Sisters Read Free

that I’d got my costume on inside out was lying. I hadn’t. It was a ploy. She wanted to engage me in conversation. She wanted to latch on to me and use me and be my friend. I had stared down at myself, fearing to see exposed stitching, perhaps even that horrible white sanitary-towel-effect strip of lining that covers my plain black swimsuit’s crotch, but could see, after a moment’s self-doubt, that there was nothing amiss. I said, coldly, something like, ‘No, I haven’t’, and pulled one of my towels around myself before striding off towards the stairs to the pool. To be honest, I probably also said, ‘Thank you.’ I’m not very good at being very rude. But I am quite good, for better or for worse, at avoiding people, and I’ve made sure that I never change in the same section as her again.
    She was an older woman, like myself. She had hoped she had spotted a weakling in need of protection. I avoided her. In fact, come to think of it, I haven’t seen her for months. Maybe she’s moved away, or died.
    I’m wary about making new friends because I’m so bad at shaking off old ones. One of the reasons why I moved to London was to avoid the demands and the pity of those people I used to know in Suffolk when I was married to Andrew. I couldn’t face them. I ran away. I still can’t decide whether courage or cowardice prevailed in me when I made that choice.
    The man in Wormwood Scrubs makes few demands on me. He is safely locked up, and he can’t get out. That’s the kind of friendship one can control, on one’s own terms. A satisfactorily uneven relationship, in which I wield the power. I wield the power because at least I am free to come and to go.
    She remembers the building years and the oxhide of Dido
    My Health Club hasn’t been open very long. It was a blow to me when the takeover bid was announced and the Virgil class closed, because I knew I would lose my new Thursday-evening friends. We were all promised concessionary membership rates if we chose to join the
Club, but it wasn’t going to be the same, was it? We Virgilians hadn’t got to know one another well enough to stay in touch naturally. We hadn’t had time to build up an easy extra-mural social life. And some of us just weren’t Health Club types. We were made homeless, and turned out to wander our ways.
    Nevertheless, there was a fascination in watching the transformation of the old building into the new. They kept the red-brick façade of the old college and gutted it inside. It was interesting to watch the scaffolding go up, and the internal structures crumble and vanish. The dark blue night sky was brilliantly illuminated by security lighting, and from my eyrie I could see the new building rise up, floor after floor, shining like a cruise ship afloat in the city. There were rumours that the top floor was being made into a swimming pool. I didn’t believe them, but they turned out to be true, and that’s where I now swim, six floors up, beneath the high clouds. But for many months the site was a little city of builders in hard yellow hats. Monstrous chutes and tubes depended from the roof, and temporary structures filled the forecourt. There were little buildings encamped within bigger buildings. False panelling with large graphics portraying athletic future clients fronted the street. I walked past the site daily, past the skips full of broken masonry that lined the pavements, and by night I watched from my window.
    I thought of Dido and the building of the city of Carthage. Like seething bees in early summer the Phoenicians built their new hive on the African shore. (That’s an Epic Simile.) They claimed the land from the indigenous shepherds, enclosing it in a boundary of strips of a stretched oxhide, and they dug and quarried and excavated, and on the citadel rose a vast temple to Juno, a temple of rich bronze. Even so rose up my Health Club, lofty and proud.
    I would like to see the ruins of Carthage. But of course I haven’t