The cloth was thinner than she remembered, or her memory had thickened it, the way memory thickens everything it loves. The weave was worn at the edges where Stefan's thumbs had worked, thousands of times, in dressing rooms from Gothenburg to Hamburg, and the faint smell that rose from them was not his smell, exactly — that had gone years ago — but the smell of the gyms themselves, canvas and liniment and other people's effort, kept faithfully by cotton.
She wrapped her left hand first. Slowly, because the sequence had to be relearned by the fingers even if the mind had never lost it. Around the wrist, three times. Across the back of the hand. Between the fingers, the old figure, knuckle by knuckle, the way he had taught her when she was seventeen and thought wrapping was a delay before the real thing began. He had cuffed her ear, not hard, and said the wrap was the real thing. The wrap was the promise you made your hands before you asked anything of them.
She finished the left and sat a while with it held up in the grey light, flexing the fingers. The hand looked like hers and not hers. It looked like a hand from a photograph she had spent twenty years not looking at.
Then she unwrapped it, fold by fold, in reverse, and folded the cloth back into its square, and wrapped the right hand not at all. She put both wraps back in the locker, squared them the way they had been, and closed the door on them without ceremony.
"You will forgive an old man for asking what that was."
Barlow was in the doorway with two mugs, because Barlow was incapable of entering a room at dawn without tea. He had been arriving at five for nine days now, since the first morning, and he had stopped knocking on the locker room doorframe somewhere around the fourth, which she chose to take as respect rather than carelessness.
"A rehearsal," she said. "It turns out I do not need them."
"No," he said. "You never did need things. That was rather the problem your brother had with you, by all accounts." He set her mug on the bench. "Plain wraps, then."
"Plain wraps," she said. "I am not fighting for the past, Frank. The past can keep its own hands warm."
He nodded as if she had confirmed a suspicion, and drank his tea, and said nothing more about it, which was one of the reasons she had agreed to let him stand in her corner. Frank Barlow understood that some sentences were doors and some were walls, and that a person who had lived behind a wall for twenty years did not need a man with a battering ram for a cornerman. He needed only to be there at the right moments with the right small thing: water, a stool, a sentence of no more than six words.
They worked in the ring, because the ring was where the exhibition would happen and Barlow believed a canvas should be learned the way a floor is learned by the person who mops it — by crossing it until the crossings stop being thought about. Greta already knew this canvas better than any fighter in the building. She had cleaned under it and around it and once, memorably, beneath the apron where a wedding ring had rolled and a young heavyweight had wept with relief when she produced it. But knowing a floor with a mop and knowing it with your feet in a stance were different knowledges, and the second one had to be coaxed back out of the body a layer at a time.
Her hands had not forgotten anything. That was the strange thing, the thing she had not expected and, if she was honest, had not entirely wanted. The jab came back in the first session as if it had been waiting just behind her shoulder all these years, patient as a dog. The combinations assembled themselves out of order and then in order. Barlow held the pads and said little, and what he said was mostly numbers, and sometimes, when a hook rolled off her shoulder the way it had in Gothenburg in 1998, he would go quiet in a way that was not about the present at all.
"Again," he said, after one of those silences. "Not for me. I want to check something."
"You want to see it again because you are an old romantic," she said.