At three she did the floor. At four she emptied her bucket, rinsed the mop, and set everything in its place in the cupboard by the cage. At half past four she put on her coat, turned off the office light that the day staff would swear they had turned off, and let herself out into the blue hour, when Port Ellery belonged to the gulls and the bakers and the ferry crews and to her.
The champions watched her go, forty years of them, straight in their frames, dusted, sheltered, remembered just enough. Behind her, in the middle of the corridor wall, the bare rectangle kept its counsel, cleaner than the paint around it, holding the shape of something that had been taken down so long ago that even the wall had nearly forgotten how to miss it.
Greta locked the door, tested it once, out of habit, and walked home through the waking town with her bag over her shoulder and her keys quiet in her pocket, unhurried, the way she did everything, as if the night had all the time in the world and had decided to lend her some.
Dane Whitaker could tell you the future, and it annoyed people how often the future listened.
It had started as a joke in his amateur days — a skinny kid from two towns inland pointing at the canvas before a bout and announcing, round two, as if the fight were a train he had already watched arrive. When it came true three times running, the joke became a nickname. When it kept coming true, the nickname became a brand. The Weather, they called him, because he didn't just forecast himself; he was the climate other men had to fight in. Twenty-four wins, three losses, and a highlight reel that moved through the regional scene like a rumour with good lighting.
At twenty-seven he was the biggest thing Northgate had ever produced, and the club knew it, and let him know it, and had perhaps let him know it once too often. His poster — four feet tall, arms crossed, storm-grey backdrop — was the first thing you saw coming through the main doors. A sponsor's logo had colonised his shorts, his robe, his water bottle, the towel over his shoulders. A regional card in six weeks' time had his face on the billboard above the highway, squinting handsomely into weather of his own making, and his manager, Rick Sorensen, walked the club two steps behind him like a man following a minor weather system of his own, phone in hand, harvesting it.
Success had done to Dane what it does to the very young and the very gifted: it had removed the friction from his life, and friction, it turns out, is what teaches a man the shape of other people. Doors opened. Queues shortened. The word no began arriving so rarely that he had started to hear it as static. He trained ferociously — nobody who knew anything accused Dane Whitaker of laziness — but he trained the way weather happens, as a force that other things accommodated. Sparring partners were rotated in to be solved. Coaches' advice was received with the bright, vacant politeness of a man listening to a forecast for a town he would never visit. When Frank Barlow, who had forgotten more about the fight game than Dane had yet lived, suggested one October morning that the boy's defence had become a rumour — "You block with your face and call it courage, son" — Dane had smiled his billboard smile and said, "Frank. When did a forecast ever need an umbrella?"
The clip had done very well. That was the problem with everything Dane said now: it was received by an audience before it was received by a person.
The staff he did not see at all, and this was not cruelty, exactly; it was a kind of blindness that fame installs like tinted glass. The woman who cleaned the club at night was, to Dane, a rumour of a person — a bucket sometimes in a doorway, a figure at the far end of a corridor when he came in early or stayed late, someone whose name he had perhaps been told and had let fall out of his head like a coin through a torn pocket. Eddie Pratt he knew by sight, because Eddie was six feet wide and sang while he worked. The night woman he knew the way you know the tide tables: she was part of the mechanism that made the building ready, and mechanisms did not have names.
"Who does the nights?" he asked once, in the changing room, not to anyone in particular.
"Greta," said one of the younger pros. "Swedish lady. Been here forever."