"Sleep is where the wall is repaired," she said. "That is all. Even walls." And then, because the corridor was empty and the moment asked for exactly one true thing and no more, "Stefan slept before fights like a stone in a river. Ten hours, anywhere, once on a bench in Hamburg with his coat for a pillow. I envied him. I was always awake, listening to the building. Some of us are the wall, Mr. Whitaker, and some of us are the night watch. It is not a ranking."
"Which one am I?" he asked, before he could stop himself, and looked appalled at the question.
"You," she said, "are the weather. Weather does not sleep. It only moves on." She said it without malice, almost fondly, and he laughed once, startled, and the late official arrived at that moment with her scales and her clipboard, and the strange small truce of the corridor folded itself away.
The weigh-in was held back at the club, in the early evening, before a photographer, two officials, and an audience consisting of Freya, Big Eddie, and three members of the youth programme who had come to watch and stayed, solemnly, as if at a launch. It was an exhibition catchweight, no belts, no titles, nothing on any table; the number was a formality both camps had agreed weeks ago, and the formality was observed with the gravity of a christening.
Freya had come straight from the ferry terminal in her dispatch jacket, and it was she — not Diane's office, not Barlow, not the folder — who had spent the previous evening at Greta's kitchen table going through the exhibition paperwork line by line, because Freya had discovered, reading the sanctioning forms, that her mother intended to sign anything put in front of her with the same trusting economy she applied to delivery receipts.
"Read it," Freya had said, in the tone she used for weather warnings on the port radio. "All of it. This one says the club can use footage forever. This one is the one Diane changed, see, where it says no humiliation marketing — she kept her word, it's here, clause nine. This one is just your name spelled right. Lindqvist with the q. They spelled it with a g on the first draft. A g, Mum."
"A g would be a different woman," Greta had said. "Perhaps she is faster."
"Sign as the q," Freya said, and put the pen in her hand, and watched her sign, and only then, with the forms squared and clipped and out of the way, had said the thing she had actually driven over to say: "You never told me because you thought it was finished. I get that now. But you could have told me it happened." And Greta had taken her daughter's hand across the table, across the paperwork, and said, "I am telling you now. It is not the same. But it is not nothing," and Freya had nodded and said, "No. It's not nothing," and that, in their family, was a cathedral of a conversation.
Now Freya stood at the edge of the scales with the clipped folder held against her chest like a shield she had issued herself, and when the official called Greta's name, it was Freya who stepped forward and turned the privacy screen — for the weigh-in was done in gym clothes and dignity, by Diane's ruling, no spectacle — and Freya who held her mother's cardigan and glasses, and Freya who said, to no one in particular and to the photographer in particular, "Eyes up here, please."
"Greta Lindqvist," the official called. "Sixty-eight point four. Under the agreed weight."
Dane stepped up after, heavier, younger, applauded by his own team out of habit. "Dane Whitaker. Eighty-one point two. Under the agreed weight." The catchweight swallowed the difference the way the harbour swallows the difference between the ferry and the gulls; it was an exhibition, and the numbers were a doorway both of them simply had to fit through, and both of them fit.
Photographs followed, the two of them at the table with the officials, pens in hand for the final signatures — the bout agreement, already read, already understood, already, in its clause nine, a small monument to a cleaner who had asked for things in writing. Greta signed with the plain pen Freya had brought from home, an ordinary ballpoint, because she saw no reason to borrow ceremony from Rick's folder. Dane signed after her. Then, to the photographer's mild despair, there was no face-off. Greta offered her hand. Dane took it. They shook, briefly, like two people concluding a property transaction, and if the grip of the older woman surprised the younger man, he had learned enough, in a corridor, in a month, to keep the surprise off his face.