Barbell on the inner wrist

The lift in Ashcroft House is out again, so I'm writing this on the back of a council envelope while I wait on the fourth-floor landing with my knees complaining. You'll laugh, but I've been thinking about the barbell in the basement room, the one Mr Dunmore bolted to the wall in 1987 and called a community gym. Nobody uses it now except Hollis from block C, and only because his doctor told him to.

Dunmore's plates never matched. There was a cracked ten kilo from the old primary school, a twenty with the paint worn off to bare iron, and collars wrapped in black bike tape that you could smell from the stairwell. Hollis would load the bar with his back to the door, counting out loud under the buzzing strip light. Nineteen. Twenty. He never once let the count drop below his own voice, even when the bar shook.

Then the housing office sent round a letter saying the basement was to be cleared for storage. Hollis came up to my flat with a face like wet cardboard and asked if I'd sign something saying the bar was mine. I asked him why. He said, "So they can't take the one thing in this building that's honest about its weight." I signed it, though I don't know what it's worth in law.

Last Tuesday they carried it out on a trolley, plates rattling, and left a dent in the stairwell wall. Hollis chalked a single line beside the door where the rack had stood, then another, then another, until there were twenty of them. I asked what they were for. He said they were the reps he hadn't done yet, and he'd finish them somewhere with better light.