by Deck Davis
A left hook at the wrong time, at the wrong guy, on the wrong part of his head.
“How’s your night been, buddy?” said the cabbie.
I wondered if he was being sarcastic. He must have seen that I hadn’t got changed properly. I was wearing a t-shirt one of the Ocadian barmen helped me put on, a black hoodie, and black joggers wet with sweat. I didn’t look like I was going for a night on the town. Still, I’d learned to be friendly even when people were being otherwise. In the world of social media, everyone could win infamy with the wrong outburst at the wrong time, and bad press would be match lighting the kindling of my career.
“I’ve had better,” I said.
“You a fighter?”
“I was,” I said. The words came out before I could even logically think about them.
“I’ve had some greats in my cab over the years. You remember Big Daddy Howsey? Man, he was a…”
I tuned him out as the city flew by, a wash of nightclub lights and honking horns and people staggering out of bars drunk, some with their arms around their wives or girlfriends, and groups of lads eight-strong singing football chants and raising pint glasses they’d smuggled out of the bar. Their Saturday night was a one of drinks and jokes and friendly sporting rivalry, but mine was a crushing loss, the last nail in a career that had been aching for death for years now, but I’d applied the defibrillator one too many times.
The death of my career was one layer of my thoughts, but there was another that night. Franz Huck’s eyes. Even while I stared at the nightlife outside, I saw Franz’s eyes reflected in the car window.
There was definitely something behind them. This wasn’t the first time I’d had a feeling like this, and it was always as mystifying. Once, I’d taken Ruby into the city to buy her a new coat. In the shop, while I was waiting for her to pick something out, a guy had brushed passed me. He was maybe fifty, with a puffy face and he wore designer glasses. When his hand accidentally brushed mine, a feeling had spread through me, thick like tar, and I felt Ruby tug on my hands and say, “What’s wrong, Dad?”
There was never anything I could put into words. Call it a brain fart, call it some kind of instinctual human reaction, I don’t know. But I added Franz Huck to the list of people I didn’t want to see again.
“Here you go,” said the cabbie, and pulled to a stop. The meter read twenty pounds, then quickly changed to twenty-two. With my right hand, I struggled to open my wallet and pay him.
“Thanks, bud. Good luck to you,” said the driver. Then, when I got out of the car, I heard him mutter, “You look like you need it. Sheesh.”
“Take a seat,” said the receptionist, eying me and no doubt wondering about my bruises and my busted nose and the thick sheen of sweat all over my face.
I took a seat in the A and E waiting room. My hand throbbed now, and Huck’s eyes were starting to leave my thoughts a little at last. Even if there was something strange to his stare, a feeling I couldn’t quite place, I had bigger concerns.
After the show, while I was waiting for the taxi, the organizer of the fight had approached me. He was a short guy with a pony-tail, and his expensive-looking suit bellied the fact that it was two sizes too big for him, and I wondered if he’d bought it at a bargain store.
“Ticket receipts weren’t what we thought,” he told me. “Sorry, pal.”
The money he paid me was half what we agreed, and it seemed like the last cheap sting in a night that had screwed me over start to finish. My throbbing left hand warned me what little good anger did, so I’d left with half the cash and vague thoughts about getting in touch with a lawyer, but knowing that in the cold light of the next morning I’d never do that.
It was a funny thing. In the ring, they used to call me an animal. Once I spotted wounded prey I circled and I waited and I looked for holes, biding my time for one explosive flurry of combinations that would extinguish the light from my opponent’s eyes. Take me out of the ring and the instinct left me; interviewers always used to say what a gentleman I was, and fans loved the time I always took to spend with them. It was like I took all my anger into the ring and wrung it dry, and that didn’t leave much for outside the canvas.
The waiting room was as full as you’d expect for an inner-city hospital on a Saturday night, and when I looked around, I found it a little crazy that even in a place like this, where all of us were here because something had happened, the ever-present rule of don’t talk to anyone you don’t know – ever - still held.
I looked at my fellow wounded and sick companions and I wondered about their lives and their stories. Like the guy a row in front and to the right, an older man with a crossword on his lap, some clues ticked off, others left to come back to later. I imagined him winning the hundred-thousand-pound prize and then rushing home to tell his wife, but the smile would quickly die on her face because he’d tell her he was divorcing her. He’d been prepared to spend his life with her to the bitter end because there was nothing else left to do, but with his new-found fortune he decided that he better live his life while he still could, and things had never been the same since the kids left home, anyway. The love he and his wife had was just affection now, like you’d have for a friend.
Or the girl sitting across from me. Pretty, with a tight ponytail and a little hole on her left earlobe that was missing an earring. Her leather boots were stained with mud, and there was a little red splotch on the thigh of her jeans. She was waiting for a boyfriend, I decided. He’d had one-too-many beers in the pub and he’d gotten into a fight, like he always does, and he’d lost, like he always does.
She looked up while I weaved an imaginary life for her, and she caught my stare, and I don’t know if a guilty expression crossed my face because she looked like she wanted to laugh, but at the same time she was studying my face, maybe even playing the same game as me and wondering why my nose was busted and my hand mangled.
Just thinking about my hand made it throb. I could feel it in my bones, the knowledge that they were broken, that I’d pushed myself too hard and that was it now, they’d never heal properly, and I’d never be able to fight again. I almost got up and left the waiting room, because I didn’t want to hear the news. Even so, right then, getting back in the ring was the last thing I wanted to do, way at the back of the line behind drinking enough beers to melt my brain, having a bath hot enough to soak deep into my skin, and then zombie-out in front of a Friends marathon, because some channel would be showing episode after episode - they always did.
My pocket buzzed. I pulled out my phone and answered, and I heard a voice I’d been trying to put off until tomorrow.
“Ten days,” she said, no hello, no ‘how are you?’ Course, I hadn’t told her about the fight. “Three payments in ten days, Josh. They aren’t fucking around. What am I going to do with Rubes when they kick us out?”
“Relax. Things don’t happen that fast.”
“They’re threatening to evict us.”
It was the mortgage company. We’d bought our house outright four years after we were married, back when I was on the up and feeling flush. Then, when my career spiraled and when my fights paid less, my account decided to make things worse by pulling a fast-one with most of the money I’d trusted him to invest. The worst thing about it was that he was an old friend from school whose accountancy business was struggling, and I’d done him a favor by using his services. The police caught up to him years later. They found him dead of a drug overdose in a dingy little flat in Derby, and he’d snorted most of the money he’d stolen from me.
When things got bad, we’d had to take a mortgage on the house to get a little collateral. Glora had debts, and there was no question about not paying them. Not with the interest. Selling the house wouldn’t have helped either, because Manchester airport had extended a terminal and changed some of their flight paths, which might have been good for travelers, but didn’t help the value of our house. If we had tried to sell it, we’d end up actually owing the bank more money.
If it were just Glora, I would have told her to go to hell. We hadn’t lived together in two years now, and the house she stayed in was half-mine, by all rights. But there was Ruby to think about. She was only eight, and I didn’t want to uproot her because it was bad enough that her mum and I had split. I wanted Rubes to keep as much innocence as she could, because you only get so much of it. Summer holidays that lasted forever, sleepovers at friend’s house, weekday nights in front of the TV, begging for your parents to let you stay up because you don’t have responsibilities and if you’re a little tired at school, so what? You only get so much of that time of your life, and I wanted Ruby to keep it. More than anything, I didn’t want her to think back on these years and resent me for it all.
So, they stayed in our family home, and I had a flat overlooking a square of bars and nightclubs in the city. I paid the mortgage payments with fight money, since Glora’s job didn’t cut it. Lately, fights were getting harder to find, and the ones I did find paid less and less. I started to mark every mortgage payment with what punishment I’d taken to get the cash. To pay the last one, I’d been knocked down in the fourth and eight rounds. I’d staggered through the ninth on legs made of rubber, then caught the guy flush in the tenth.
For the next payment, though, and the three we were in arrears, one shattered hand wasn’t going to be enough. I’d have to sell my belts, maybe the British belt I won in 2004. The belts were the last things I had to remember everything, but Rubes was more important.
“Well? What can we do? I worked twelve hours over time last week,” said Glora.
“Give me a day or two.”
“I can’t sleep. I need to know this is being sorted.”
“I’ll call you in the morning,” I said. Then a strange feeling overwhelmed me. It was something welling behind my eyes. “Think I could speak to Ruby?” I said.
She paused. “It’s past midnight, Josh.”
“I’ll come around in the morning, first thing, then.”
“No,” said Glora, her voice a little different. There was an edge to it. “Don’t come. Call me instead.”
“It’s no bother, and like you said, we need to talk this out properly.”
“Don’t come around. Not in the morning, at least.”
“Is someone there with you?” I said.
Glora breathed into the phone. “I better go. Listen, I’m sorry for yelling and being a bitch. It’s been a hard week, and I’m just scared. I know you’re trying, and I don’t exactly help going at you like that.”
She hung up, leaving me back in the world of doctors shuffling down corridors, doors opening and shutting, trolleys being wheeled through by bored-looking orderlies. A TV fixed to a bracket on the wall read the day’s news headlines in an endless loop, seeming to struggle to find enough goings-on in the world to justify being a 24 hours channel.
That edge in Glora’s voice. Her reluctance to answer. I knew this would come, of course. I mean, we were separated, and it was my fault. But the idea of another guy in my house, drinking beer out of my mugs, hell, saying goodnight to my kid.
It’s not Glora’s fault, I told myself. She was the nicest girl I’d ever met, and I was the shittiest husband it was possible to have. Maybe not at first, but toward the end. I was trying to make amends, but you can’t just erase everything, and the shitty things you do leave a scar.
It was hard, sometimes, not to pin the blame elsewhere. Like on other people, other things, on circumstance, coincidence, on being unlucky. Mainly, when I was in a stinking mood, I’d blame it on that night.
George La Nana. The Babe, they called him, mostly because his surname means that in French. If I died with a name on my lips it’d be his, and if I had any kind of artistic ability, I could draw his face perfectly, because I could see every inch of it in my head. I used to think about his face every second of every day, seeing him on the canvas with his eyes wide open, completely lifeless as if they were made of glass.
The Babe was from Marseille. Like a lot of the guys you find in my profession, his upbringing was modest. His dad repaired shoes, and his mum was a number caller in a bingo hall. He left school when he was fifteen after getting expelled, and he’d been in trouble with the police more times than you could count. Beneath it all, though, he was a good guy, just one who’d lost his way. Boxing was the path that let him find it, and once he’d found something to focus on, all the bad stuff disappeared. Look him up, you’d see the Babe spending hours with fans after winning a fight, you’d see him visiting schools and teaching the kids fitness drills. These weren’t just photo opportunities; the Babe was a talented fighter with a heart.
Our fight was supposed to set the winner up for a shot at the European WFB title. After that, who knew? Maybe a world title. Whatever the future, our fight would end with one of us jetting to a higher plane, the other dusting himself off and getting ready to slog back up the hill.
That was how it should have ended.
I caught him in the seventh with a shot to his ribs. He staggered a little, and I thought I could finish him. My corner was yelling at me to take him out, but the Babe was too savvy; he fought on instinct, doing just enough to hear the bell.
When the eight started, I was flush with adrenaline, I was more pumped than I’d ever been. I tried to keep a narrow focus, just me and the Babe and the weaknesses I’d opened on him, but even so I could faintly see the flash of cameras, I could almost hear the interviewer’s questions after the fight about what was next.
He rocked me out of my dreams with a savage shot to my stomach. I’m talking the kind where the air leaves you all in one, and it leaves you feeling empty, as if your stomach has knotted in on itself like a dishrag. I had to take a knee and get a count. First time I’d ever done that.
They chanted my name then. We were in Harbinger Hall in Manchester, and the home crowd were insane in their support for me. I saw carboard signs with my name on them, and some witty guy even threw a copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the ring. I think they threw him out of the arena.
The more I listened to them shout ‘Tempest! Tempest!’, the better I felt. When I got to my feet, I was a new man. The Babe didn’t have my instincts; he hung back a little too long, still wary of me, and that was what I needed to see me through the tightness. When I felt the air come back into my lungs, felt my stomach loosen, I was ready.
I caught him with the kind of hook that draws a gasp from the crowd. Normally punches don’t cut it; boxing fans are conditioned to the one-two jabs, even to solid rights that rock people’s skulls. Some punches are so sickening they provoke an involuntary reaction in people. Almost like sympathy and shock and excitement rolled into one, and you can tell they revel in the barbarity but they’re sickened by it at the same time.
Babe staged back. He fell into the ropes and he got tangled up in them. Next, he was on his back, and then things turned. Something left him. I swear, I could feel it. Something leaving the Babe, it almost seemed to float passed me, and I knew what had happened then.
I vomited on the ring. My coach squeezed my shoulder but I wiped my lips and told him to forget me and go look at the Babe. It was too late. The trainers and cutmen and ring doctors crowded around him seemed to tremor as one, as if the bad news hit them like a set of dominoes, toppling each of these men who’d grown up in the sport and were used to bruises and blood.
Nobody blamed me. It was the opposite; from the amount of sympathy cards and emails and discussions on fan forums, you’d think I was the one who died. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I could stop myself reading them. ‘Poor guy,’ they’d write. ‘Imagine having to live with that.’
That did it for me. I knew that boxing was boxing, and things happened. Get into the ethics all you want; people certainly did at the time on television. But Babe and I, we knew the risks every time we got in the ring. We saw the worry in our loved one’s eyes, me in Glora’s, Babe in his father’s. It was something you knew could happen, but at the same time
it would never happen, not in a million years. Like when you’re young and you hear about a great, great uncle having a heart attack, and you’re sad, but it’s not a wake-up call, you don’t think ‘this could happen to me.’ It always seems to happen to someone else.
Poor guy. Imagine having to live with that.
Yeah. But imagine having to live with a guy who became a mess of guilt. Who didn’t train for two years straight, who drank a quarter of whiskey every night, who lashed out. Not physically, of course, but I was hell to live with. Imagine being the promoter or the manager or the coach for a guy like that. You’d do what my team did – you’d drift away. Maybe not immediately, but it’d happen.
Soon, Glora was gone, my coach was gone, my manager didn’t answer the phone. It was just me.
It was only my financial crisis that got me back into the ring, and that was for the sad reason that I simply couldn’t do anything else. Boxing had been my life, and I’d gambled everything on it.
I wasn’t the only person to lose in that fight. Babe had paid the ultimate price. Glora and Ruby, too, because although it didn’t happen right away, Glora lost a husband, and Ruby lost a father. Then there were others, the people on the outskirts of this destructive blast like the owner of Harbinger Hall, who had to shut down the place when an inquest found dozens of health and safety breaches.
So there, in the waiting room, when I thought about my hand possibly being smashed beyond repair and never being able to fight again, it flooded me with an exhausting mix of happiness and grief.
Happiness because I’d never have to think about it again. Grief because what the hell would I do for Ruby?
“You’re Joshua Tempest, right?” said a voice.
It was the girl. The one whose boyfriend I imagined had started a fight in a pub. Maybe it was over a jibe about his team getting smashed 3-0. Maybe a guy got too close to his girlfriend, and his drunken state made him quick to shove the guy away, perhaps a bit too hard because he hit the bar, spilling the double-vodka shots a gaggling hen party were about to drink.
