Page 6 of Not That Ridiculous

“All right,” I said with resignation.

I had to do this. I’d promised my doctor.

I hadn’t promised that I’d like it, though. Or that I’d do it with good grace.

“I’ll go and change. D’you want a drink or anything, or are you happy to hang with Phil?”

“Always happy to hang with Phil!”

I dropped a hand to the top of Phil’s head, gently tugged the weird little fluff patch growing there, and ran upstairs to change.

When I came back down, self-conscious and itchy in my brand-new gym kit, Phil had Jasper on the floor. Despite the fact he was the size of a small bear, he’d crawled into Jasper’s lap to mash himself up against Jasper’s chest and rest his big head on Jasper’s shoulder.

“I’m covered in dog hair,” Jasper announced once he’d extracted himself.

I kept a lint roller for just such an occasion on the hall table alongside the bowl for my keys and my stack of junk mail. I grabbed it and passed it to him.

Since a significant portion of Phil was St. Bernard, Jasper probably had a fair amount of drool down the back of his t-shirt as well as all that hair. I didn’t mention it.

He rolled the fluff off his t-shirt and sweatpants with practiced efficiency, made kissy noises to a disappointed Phil, and chivvied me out the front door. He waited while I wrestled it shut and then fought with the latch—the old wood had a tendency to swell up and stick in damp weather, and you had to know how to jiggle the latch to get it to engage—and escorted me down the drive and into the passenger seat of his car.

I’d done the right thing in asking Jasper to be my personal trainer. There was no way I’d ever have made it to the gym under my own steam, and even though I didn’t want to go, I knew that I had to.

Things had got on top of me in the last couple of years since I’d bought my house, and it was starting to show. I had dark circles under my eyes that never went away, if I had a bad night there were definitely bags the next morning, and my naturally wiry frame was shading towards scrawny.

Barely two months after I’d bought the house, my parents had decided to sell The Chipped Cup to me and my younger sister, Amalie, and flew off to Spain to live a life of leisurely retirement in the sun.

That had been unexpected enough, but barely a month after that, once I’d sunk every spare penny I had into buying my share of the business, Amalie had suddenly decided that the family legacy could stuff it, her destiny was not slinging brew to people she’d known all her life, and she’d run off to find herself somewhere on the other side of the planet.

It was her loss, anyway.

A few years down the road I’d own The Chipped Cup outright and be set for the future and she’d have, what? A camera roll full of glamorous locations and the smiling faces of strangers she’d met in various hostels all over the globe.

I was just thankful that she’d agreed to let me buy her out in monthly instalments rather than selling her share to the first rando who’d give her a lump sum for it and who didn’t mind getting an extremely pissed-off co-owner (me) as part of the deal.

Now I was thirty-one years old, all of my income went towards paying off loans, mortgages, and my sister, and the last time I went to the doctor for a checkup, I got a very stern talking-to.

I wasn’t okay, but until then I’d thought that I was at least successfully pretending to be. I hadn’t realised that someone would look at me and think, There is a man on the edge.

And yet, Dr Farrell had informed me, that was exactly what she’d written in her notes. Charlie Galloway, man on the edge. She’d scribbled out a prescription on a small pad, and handed it to me with a smirk.

Life: get one.

Coffee: cut it out.

Vegetables: eat some.

Exercise: ask Jasper!

I’d gone to school with Hannah Farrell from the age of five to eighteen. The woman thought she was funny.

She was not.

I read the prescription with a scowl and informed her that I had a life, I’d drink coffee until the day I died, I was open to the concept of vegetables, and I got plenty of exercise all day long, thanks.

“Work doesn’t count,” she’d said. “I’m talking about fun exercise. Something that’s good for your mental health and gets you out of that fucking coffee shop once in a while. You need to shake things up.”

“Shake things up? What are you, my doctor or my life coach?”

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