Tony entered the small, square-shaped sauna and saw the man sitting proudly astride the middle of the top bench. Two thick, gold neck-chains swayed low beneath his stocky, sweating, dark brown torso. “Arrite?” he said to Tony an abrasive native Welsh accent. Tony nodded, said “arrite” back and sat down to one side.
They sat there for several minutes.
“Nice few days we’ve had but now it’s..”
“-Clouded over again,” Tony finished for him.
“Clouded over, yeah.”
“Yeah. It is April though,” Tony reasoned.
“Nice few days though.”
A couple more minutes passed.
“You local?”
“Oh yeah, just one of the flats out the back,” Tony said, and waved his arm in the direction of the flats out the back. “You?”
“Yeah, just down the road. Been a member long?”
“About eight or nine months I suppose. You.”
“Four and a half years. Does me, like. Got everything I want.”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“You know what gets me though?”
Tony had a feeling he was going to hear. It was a rhetorical question.
“Well they say they want your comments and they get em and don’t do nothing about em, like. You know the lights by the sinks? I want to freshen up like. The point of the gym’s to leave fresh innit, have a shave. But those lights, you know what I mean?”
That was an actual question.
“Oh, um..” The lights over the basins never struck Tony as being inadequate. They seemed fine. But was perhaps slightly darker over one sink than the other. “Yeah, one side seems a bit darker than the other.”
“Exactly! You’ve seen it. You can barely see what you’re doing! I tells em it’s not good enough like. Health and safety, innit?”
At this point he does one of his squitty spits on the floor, between the wooden slats of the sauna bench. It’s revolting, and the third or fourth time he’s done since Tony entered.
“Health and fucking safety, you know? Else you’ll cut your fucking neck open when you're shaving like. What they want, I tells em, is proper, posh lighting. You think you’re a posh hotel like, you should get posh lights, all in-built to the walls, you know. Proper. I could do it for them, I’m an electrician too see.“
The man continued in this vein for several minutes, Tony intermittently nodding and shaking his head, sighing and swearing his support.
He lost the thread for a moment and glanced up to see his companion snarling firmly back, “…don’t know what they’re fucking doing, I tell you.” The lighting over the changing room basins was a huge deal to him, an ongoing cause. He spat again. The glob of saliva splutted onto the tiled floor below.
Tony nodded back seriously, then shook his head in disbelief at the incompetence, wondering if this man had ever killed people. He wouldn’t be surprised.
“No, you're right. Fucking crazy,” Tony said, because it felt right, on a few levels.
“Fucking right it is. You see, what they want is more people complaining about the lights. At the moment they say I’m the only one who’s said anything about it. If they get more complaints then they might do something about it like. Put posh ones in so you can see what you’re doing when your shaving. They just need more people to say it’s not bright enough.”
It was getting boring now.
“Ah, right. Well I’ll mention it if I see anyone,” Tony said, and got up to leave.
