She walked out through the gym, past the ring she would stand in, past the champions' wall she would dust that night, and the crooked banner, and into the grey Port Ellery afternoon, unhurried, with the whole long dayshift of her other life still ahead of her — while behind her, in the echoing room, the young champion stood a moment longer at the empty table, reading the flat, assembled words of his apology where they lay, and then, slowly, folded the statement in half, and then in half again, and put it in his pocket, as if it were something he intended to deal with later, properly, and himself.
The medicals were held on a wet Tuesday at the county sports clinic, in a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and old coffee, and Greta approached them the way she approached everything official: early, with her documents already in order, and with no expectation that the process would be interested in her as a person. She had brought her passport, her insurance card, a list of medications that amounted to one entry read aloud in a tone of apology by the nurse — "That's it?" "That is it." "Honey, you are my favourite patient this year" — and the printed bloodwork Diane's office had arranged the week before.
The doctor was a woman in her forties with a cyclist's tan lines and a manner that suggested she had failed exhibitions before and would again if given cause. She read the bloodwork. She read it again. She listened to Greta's heart for a long time, moved the stethoscope, listened again, and looked over her glasses with the expression of a person whose suspicions have been disappointed.
"Resting fifty-eight," she said. "Blood pressure of a twenty-year-old who lies about it. Eyes?"
"Good," Greta said. "For reading. For distance I have glasses, in my bag, for the ferry schedules. In the ring, Mr. Barlow assures me the other person will be close."
The doctor wrote something without smiling, which Greta chose to believe was a smile being saved for later. The reflexes were tested. The hands were examined, turned over, flexed. "You've wrapped these properly for years," the doctor said. It was not a question.
"Someone taught me the wrap is a promise," Greta said, and the doctor nodded as if this were a recognised medical position, and signed.
Dane's medical was in the next room and took longer, partly because his paperwork had arrived in Rick Sorensen's folder and partly because youth, in Greta's observation over three years of mopping around it, travels with more entourage than age does. She heard, through the clinic's thin wall, the muffled percussion of a man being found embarrassingly healthy, and then a nurse's laugh, and then the particular silence of a blood pressure cuff. He emerged with a form in his hand and an expression of grievance.
"They asked about my sleep," he said to Rick, and then, seeing Greta on the corridor bench with her folder held square on her knees, redirected the grievance at the world in her direction. "Four questions about sleep. Like it's a — like sleep is part of it."
"It is part of it," Greta said.
"Yeah, well." He sat, because the weigh-in official was late and there were only two benches, and for a while there was just the rain on the clinic windows and the smell of coffee. He turned his form over. He turned it back. "You pass?"
"I pass," she said. "You also pass, I think. You are only complaining about the questions."
"I sleep fine," he said, to the form. "I just — before fights I don't, that's normal, everybody—" He stopped, in the new way he had developed, mid-sentence, as if he had begun to hear himself in the last month the way other people heard him. "Four questions though," he finished, more quietly, and Greta, who had raised a daughter through the ferry dispatch years and the night classes and one long depression that had come off the sea like weather, recognised the sound of a young person discovering that his body had been filing reports about him.