The club was quietest at eleven, and that was when Greta liked it best. The last of the evening fighters had gone by ten, trailing shower steam and argument, and the day staff had left the lights on in the office and a radio talking to nobody. She came in through the side door with her own key, hung her coat on the hook that had been hers for three years, and set her bucket down by the cage with the small, settled clank of a thing going where it belonged.
Northgate Athletic Club had been a cannery once, and in some ways it still was. The walls were thick, the windows high and narrow, the floor a poured concrete that held the cold even in August, and on wet nights the whole building smelled faintly of the harbour three streets down — diesel, salt, rope, the green breath of the bay. The owners had done what they could. There was a boxing ring at the centre under a rig of lights, an MMA cage along the far wall, rows of heavy bags hanging like patient fruit, and everywhere the particular perfume of a working gym: leather, canvas, liniment, sweat soaked so deep into the mats that no cleaning product on earth would ever entirely argue it out.
Greta did not try to argue it out. She had a more modest philosophy of cleaning, earned over thirty years of other people's buildings: you did not defeat a place, you kept it honest. You took away what the day had dropped and left the rest in peace.
She worked in the same order every night. Office first, while the radio finished its programme and went to the shipping forecast, which she listened to the way other people listened to music. Then the changing rooms, which were not as bad as people assumed, because fighters, whatever else they were, were creatures of routine and left their mess in predictable places. Then the cage, the ring apron, the bags wiped down one by one. Then the floor, in long slow lanes, the mop describing the same patient arcs. Last of all, the corridor.
The corridor ran along the north wall between the office and the training floor, and it was the club's memory. Both sides were hung with framed photographs, going back forty years: champions of the region, most of them forgotten by everyone except the families who still pointed at the frames. Heavyweights with their hands held high in black and white. A woman from the seventies with a perm like a helmet, grinning through a mouthguard. Young men, old men, a boy of nineteen who had won a Golden Gloves title and then, the caption said, gone to work on the ferries and never fought again. Somebody — Frank Barlow, probably, in one of his curatorial moods — had typed the captions on index cards and slipped them under the glass.
Greta dusted the frames every night, though they only needed it twice a week. It was the part of the shift she allowed herself to take slowly. She used a soft cloth, not the duster, and she went frame by frame, and if a picture had slipped crooked in its wire she straightened it with two fingers, the way you would straighten a collar.
"A wall is not admired for standing," she had said once, years ago, to a man who was paid to listen to her talk and who understood perhaps half of it. "It is admired for what it shelters." She had been talking about boxing at the time, though she had not said so, and the sentence had stayed with her the way true sentences do, outliving the conversation.
Halfway down the corridor, between a middleweight from 1994 and a team photograph of the club's first women's squad, there was a space. It was not a large space. A frame had hung there once — you could tell by the rectangle of paint a shade cleaner than the rest, and by the two nail holes, plugged long ago with filler that had yellowed differently from the wall. Nobody remarked on it. Visitors walked past it the way you walk past a missing tooth in a familiar smile, feeling it without seeing it.
Greta dusted the space too. She ran the cloth over the bare rectangle of wall with exactly the same care she gave the glass and the wood, neither more nor less, and then she moved on. If anyone had asked her why, she would have had to think, and she did not care to think about it, and so nobody asked.