The weights took two weeks to arrive. For that entire time, Stephen worried almost constantly that they wouldn’t be heavy enough. At twenty kilograms, they probably would be, but he could not be sure.

For all online shopping’s benefits, this was one of its biggest flaws. Things like books or CDs were okay. You knew what they looked like, and didn’t need to feel them to know what you were getting. But he’d never understood some of the things that people could buy on the internet. Furniture, clothes, shoes: items that you surely needed to touch before you bought them. Even with dimensions or measurements, you could never really get a proper feel of something.

Weights were no different. 20 kilograms was a tangible number, but it meant nothing to him. To know if the weights would be heavy enough, he needed to pick them up. What stopped him was the image of his going into a sports shop to test them out. Slaloming in and out of muscle freaks in tight t-shirts whose arms didn’t reach their sides, people who could probably lift him up with one hand, he’d weave his way to the dumbbells. He’d find twenty kilograms, and see how heavy it was. As he struggled to lift it, the guy at the till would be smirking at him, and doing it openly because he knew that there was nothing Stephen could do in retaliation.

At least when the weights arrived, he could stop worrying about them. Maybe then he could have a few hours’ respite until something else came to take its place. The last few weeks it had been the weights; the month before that it had been the mould on his bedroom wall, which was the successor to the hernia he convinced himself he’d had.

He wasn’t sure if this perpetual anxiety had been triggered by something in his childhood, or if it had some other origin. All he did know was that it had always been with him, at least as far back into his life as his memory would take him. There would always be those three or four years from birth that were inaccessible to him, which may as well have been lived by someone else. Maybe some traumatic incident had occurred then, which had forever conditioned him to be anxious. Worrying was as intrinsic to his thought as words were to speaking. When he waited for a bus, he was convinced it would be late and he would get detention, even if the bus had never been late before. Every time he had milk, he’d have to sniff it two or three times to ensure that it wasn’t spoiled. He assiduously washed his hands before meals like a surgeon prepping for an operation, and then used a toothpick to excavate dirt from under his fingernails until they stung.

If the weights weren’t heavy enough, then that was it. He couldn’t afford to buy any more, at least not for now. He lived alone with his mother and, while they weren’t poor, they were certainly not well-off. Her job at a local supermarket kept them in food, rent and a TV Licence, but not much else.

He would’ve liked to have got a weekend job, but work was out of the question for him. It wasn’t the work itself he was worried about. He actually quite liked the idea of working; of having money to spend and the satisfaction of having earned that money. What stopped him was the thought of serving customers. Having to speak loud enough and clear enough so that they could hear him, and not get angry like people did when he spoke quietly. Like the teachers at his school who became visibly frustrated at him, exhibiting their anger in a way they wouldn’t have dared with their classes’ actual troublemakers, of whom they were equally as visibly scared. In addition to confrontational customers, he pictured a scenario involving people from his school discovering where he worked. This scenario branched out into individual episodes where groups of classmates came to humiliate him at work. Another saw them making a false complaint to his manager which resulted in his sacking.

Without a job, his sole income was from the bi-annual gifts he received from relatives on his birthday and Christmas.

The only comfort he had was the fact that his mother had allowed him to buy the weights at all. Her permission was reluctant and begrudging, but it was there.

In an ideal situation, he wouldn’t have told her about them. Like him, she was a worrier; only one with thirty years more experience. In recent years, the internet had assisted her, by providing easy and unmediated access to horror stories for every situation imaginable. No part of the body was not vulnerable to hideous, deforming diseases. No mode of transport wasn’t certain to land you debilitated or dead. No city or town wasn’t infested with gangs who’d rob you then viciously assault you just for the fun of it.

She told him these stories compulsively. She told him about the dangers of going outdoors (damaged lungs from the city’s pollution, muggings, skin cancer from the sun); and what would happen if he remained inside (bone and muscle problems from too much sitting, rickets from too little sunlight, damage to his lungs from not enough fresh air.)

It had been obvious, then, not to tell her about the weights. The only problem was that the website didn’t allow him to specify a delivery date. His mother worked evenings, and so was home during the day. Unless the weights came on a weekend, it’d be her who’d have to sign for them. With all this in mind, he’d resigned himself to telling her. When he did, she had been distraught. Play the footage to someone without giving it context, and they would think it was the announcement of an unwanted pregnancy, or an exclusion from school.

He had waited for around a minute as she sat at the table, her head in her hands. Then she looked up and told him about all the stories you saw on the internet, about what happened to people who used weights. Burst biceps, torn triceps, skeletal injuries that left them permanently deformed. And all of that before you even got on to arthritis in later life, and the risk of kidney or liver failure (she couldn’t remember which) that came from drinking protein shakes.

He had said that he understood the risks, and asked if he could still get the weights. She had nodded without speaking, and then had stormed out of the room.

June sat at the table, anticipating the doorbell. Stephen had ordered the weights two weeks ago, using delivery guaranteed within a fortnight, and so they would have to come today. It was typical of her luck that her anguish would be prolonged for the maximum amount of time. Why couldn’t the weights have come in the first week? At least then she would’ve had some time to get used to the idea.

Although her tea had gone cold, she continued to drink it. It was tasteless, but it occupied her hands and kept her from picking at her nails, which she usually did when nervous. Since discovering that the accumulated sugar from even one cup a day could result in diabetes, she had gone without, so her tea always lacked flavour no matter what its temperature it was. The only reason she drank it was for the caffeine. Coffee would have probably been better for that, but then there was that article which had said how coffee could lead to cancer.

What frustrated her the most was the way that Stephen had dismissed her concern about weights as if they were inconsequential ramblings. ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he had said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ But he had not read what she had. He hadn’t seen the stories on the internet. The men and women who’d also been convinced that they ‘knew what they were doing’. Who were now lying in hospital beds with torn and ripped muscles. There was even that man who had died from a twisted stomach.

And even if none of this was true, or even if Stephen knew enough about safe weight training that he could avoid injury, what about his growth? Weight training at his age was known to stunt growth. Of course she loved Stephen very much, and he was a lovely, handsome boy who any girl would be lucky to have. But he was – and she was only being honest – very small. How could he expect to ever grow if he started doing weights?

His stature had been a continual source of stress to her over the last few years. She knew that it wasn’t due to not eating, because he always ate downstairs where she could see him. In a way, though, this was worse. At least if he had been starving himself there would have been some explanation for his thin – no, skeletal – body. When she had first learned what tapeworms were, it had taken hours of frantic research to reassure her that it was unlikely Stephen had one. There had also been a dark time where she thought that he might have bulimia, which had only been cured when she had spent the week surreptitiously listening to him whenever he went to the toilet to hear that he wasn’t throwing up.

Despite all of this, she had let him buy them. She still kept to the resolution she’d made years ago, when she said that she would refuse him things as seldom as possible. After his father had left home, he had been devastated. For two or three weeks afterwards, he had been almost completely silent. He only talked to say ‘thank you’ for dinner or to say ‘goodnight’ when he went to bed. He’d lie around the house all day, doing nothing apart from running to the window whenever he thought he’d heard his father’s car pull into the drive. Everything she had done to cheer him up hadn’t worked, and she had felt powerless. It was like watching someone drowning through a window.

She had decided that if she couldn’t make him happy, she would at least prevent him from getting sadder. Whenever he asked for things, she said yes. She even let him have that new breakfast cereal; the one doused in sugar and E-numbers. Two years had passed since his father had left, and she had kept to her resolution. Within reason, she let him have whatever he wanted. Every time he asked for something that she thought was dangerous, though, she’d warn him about it. She’d given him the cereal, but had told him how sugar could not only rot teeth, but cause gum problems. Then she’d said that, if bad enough, gum problems could even be serious enough that they could lead to heart trouble.

Anything else would have been negligent parenting. As a parent, she had the right to worry; so much so that it was illogical to call it ‘worry’. Worrying suggested irrationality, and ensuring that her son was not late for school, or did not suffer serious digestive problems from the consumption of spoiled milk, was not irrational by any standards of reasonable thought.

But knowing that she was doing the right thing did not make her efforts any less tiring. Monitoring his behaviour was exhausting. As was the frustration she felt whenever he ignored her warnings. Almost daily they would argue as she tried to help him and he resisted. He would tell her that all she did was ‘interfere’ and that she was ‘suffocating’ him. When he spoke like this, she felt like giving up. She would say to herself, “I won’t tell him anything and he can make his own mistakes”; “he can drink soft drinks and rot all of his teeth away or destroy his retinas from not wearing sunglasses”. She imagined him writhing in agony in some hospital bed, or spending an equally agonising fortnight awaiting the results of a medical test, all the while knowing that this could have been prevented if he had only listened to her.

These thoughts never lasted long, though. Despite being in the right, and despite only trying to help him, she loved him too much to feel like this. Getting hurt would be what he deserved, but she didn’t want that to happen to him. He was her son, and it was her duty as a mother to protect him. No matter how much it upset him, or how often he said that she was suffocating him, she’d carry on doing so.

She heard a noise outside, and jumped up from the chair. She faced the front door, and saw no shadow behind the glass. It hadn’t been the door knocking: probably just the wind or something. She sat back down, encircling her hands around the tea. Funny how the outside of the mug felt so hot when the tea itself was tepid.

He was getting the weights, and that was final. The time for hoping that he would change his mind was over. There were only two outcomes she could now hope for. The first was that he got the weights, developed the muscles he wanted, continued growing otherwise, and this all came at no cost to his health. But this was completely unrealistic; more a fantasy than a scenario. The second scenario was more likely. In it, he got his weights, trained with them daily, and then one day got injured. The injury was not serious, and didn’t leave any permanent damage, but worried him enough that he stopped using the weights. She was hoping for something that would mentally scar him, without leaving any lasting physical damage.

This second was more likely than the first, but it was still less probable than the third scenario her mind presented her with. In this, he got his weights, and kept on using them. Then, one day, he would get derailed by an injury. Only this injury was not minor. There would be no possibility of hospital-bed contrition, or a resolve to be more sensible. Whatever the damage was, it would be both serious and irreversible. If it didn’t result in death, then the life it left him with would not be much better.

When Stephen got home, the weights were waiting for by the door. He bent down to pick up the box, and found that he could barely lift it. Only by bending, and taking the strain onto his thighs and knees, could he get it off the ground. He stood straight, and held it in his arms. Someone watching him might have thought he was grimacing. He was actually smiling. For once in his life, he had gotten lucky: the weights were heavy enough.

He climbed the stairs, his legs and arms trembling with each step. Once in his bedroom, he threw the package onto the mattress. The mattress sunk in a little, which reminded him of diagrams he’d seen of black holes bending space-time in his GCSE science books.

Looking at the weights, he thought of everyone who had made fun of him. People laughing at his body when he changed for P.E.; children at school who knocked him onto the floor and told him to not dare stand up while a crowd stood around and watched. For years, he had accepted that as just being a part of his life. Now, he knew that it would all soon stop.

Upstairs, June heard Steven’s bedroom door close.

Although she hadn’t seen him take the weights up, she had heard him. It had been obvious that he was struggling. Each step had taken him three or four seconds, and she had heard him grunting with the strain.

In her head, she heard his voice. He was telling her that yes, this was true, but he had managed it. He had been able to get them up the stairs. She responded to him by saying that yes, he had gotten them up the stairs; she admitted it. But that was only after a struggle. How could he expect to lift those weights every day, using one arm at a time, when he could barely carry them in both? And what was the cost of him getting them up the stairs? What damage had been done to his muscles?

She pictured minute, insidious tears forming on the surface of his muscles and tendons. Undetectable, these little rivulets would soon form into streams, and then rivers, before bursting into seas of blood, of ruptures, of hospital visits and agony, of nerve damage, of physiotherapy and addiction to painkillers or the contraction of a virus in an unclean hospital.

She hadn’t even thought of that until now. You read about it all the time: people going into hospital for minor operations or procedures and leaving with some disease.

The story of the man who had died from working out came to her again as if she had heard it only minutes earlier. He had been using much heavier weights than Stephen – that was true – but he was a lot bigger than Stephen. Stephen was small, and could suffer the same fate from a small amount of weight. It was just logic.

No, she said to herself. Enough was enough. He could get angry at her. He could say that she was being intrusive or smothering him. All of these things could happen, and she would be fine with it, because his resenting her was better than his not being around to resent her.

If it wasn’t for work, she would have gone to him now and told him. A few weeks ago it had been half-term, and she had taken time off so that he wouldn’t be home by himself. There was no way they’d let her take time off so soon afterwards.

First thing tomorrow, though, she would do it. She’d take away his weights by force if she had to. She’d give him the money back. She would protect him.

Stephen had called the cab as soon as his mother had left for work. Ten minutes later, it took him to the river. The driver had obviously been confused by his large coat with its many pockets, and the box of weightlifting equipment, but had not said anything. This was London, and Stephen probably wasn’t even the strangest person this guy had picked up today.

‘River’ didn’t seem the right name for it. The water was brown and murky; more a broth than a soup. Instead of marine life, dishevelled condoms and the odd needle swam through it. It was disgusting, but it was secluded. People only really came out here at night, and he would not be disturbed.

Sitting on a bench, he opened the weights, and started putting them into the coat’s pockets. He looked into the river, and wondered how long it would take him to sink to the bottom.