The archive lived in what had been the cannery's cold store, a low room off the corridor with no windows and a dehumidifier that ticked like a patient clock. Frank Barlow had built it the way other men build gardens: slowly, out of salvage, for reasons that were mostly love and slightly obsession. Fight tapes from forty years of the region. Labelled shelves. A ledger in his own handwriting going back to a time before the club had computers, and then, on the far shelves, in boxes marked with countries and years in faded marker, the exchange tapes — the coaching trips, the favours traded between gyms, the reels and cassettes and discs that had come to him across water and been kept.
He knew where 1998 lived. That was the thing he did not say to himself as he stood in the cold store on Sunday night with the office phone unplugged: he had known since the frame froze. His feet had known. Memory in an old coach is not stored in the head, it is stored in the route — and his hands, reaching past Sweden 1996 and Sweden 2001 to a box at the end of the second shelf, moved with the dreadful steadiness of a man opening a door he has been walking past, deliberately not opening, for twenty-five years.
The box said GOTHENBURG 98, EXCHANGE, and underneath, in the same hand, younger: HER.
Inside: three cassettes in paper sleeves, a programme card gone soft at the corners, and a notebook. He took the middle cassette. The tape machine in the office — kept working out of the same stubbornness that kept Barlow working — took it with a small mechanical sigh.
The fight filled the screen badly, the way the past always does: colours bleeding, a Scandinavian ring under hard white light, a crowd standing in the Scandinavian way, close and quiet and totally committed. Two women in the ring, and the younger Barlow somewhere out of frame with his borrowed towel and his borrowed Swedish, thirty-six years old and certain he was there to teach.
Then the camera found her, and Frank Barlow, at sixty-one, in a shut office, said "There you are" out loud to nobody, in the tone of a man greeting someone at a station.
He remembered the week the way you remember a room you once lived in: not whole, but by its furniture. A borrowed gym above a bakery. Snow that came sideways off the harbour and made the Swedes shrug and the visiting Englishman take photographs. He had gone to Gothenburg at thirty-six with a head full of American certainties, hired to teach infighting to a stable of young professionals, and on the second night they had put him in a corner — not to work it, just to stand in it and watch, a courtesy to a guest — and he had watched nine rounds of the local girl dismantle a champion with tools he had come to teach and had never seen arranged in that order. She had shaken his hand afterwards in the corridor, this tall solemn girl with the braids, and asked him, in careful English, whether American fighters also believed a punch must be answered in the same breath it arrived, or whether that was only a thing Swedes said about Americans. He had laughed. He had also, that night, started the notebook.
On the screen now she was in the fifth round, and the other woman's corner was shouting for the body, for pressure, for anything that would make the wall be in one place long enough to be hit — and the wall declined, and declined, and the counters ticked over like a meter running.
She was twenty-six on the tape, perhaps twenty-seven. Tall for her weight, upright, with her hair braided back hard and her guard held in that economical northern style that looks like nothing until you are inside it. The other woman — a good fighter, a champion of somewhere, the programme card said a record with one loss — came forward the way Dane Whitaker came forward, downhill, all weather one way, because in 1998 as now the obvious plan against Greta Lindqvist was pressure, and the footage showed what the record books had already told anyone who cared to look: pressure did not work. It arrived, and the shoulder rolled under it. It arrived again, harder, and the feet had rearranged the geography. Hooks went past her head into the cold Gothenburg air and the counters came back short and clean and unhurried, and round by round the other woman's belief drained visibly out of her shoulders, because there is a particular despair, Barlow remembered feeling it even from the corner, in hitting a person who will not be hit and cannot be made to fall.