"She's the one leaves the towels weird," Dane said, and it got a laugh, and that was the entire file he kept on the woman who would, within the fortnight, be the only person in the building whose opinion of him he could not stop thinking about. But that was later. That week she was a function, and functions were beneath weather.
His training days had a liturgy, and the whole club set its clocks by it. He arrived at nine with Rick and a camera phone already running, because in Dane's economy an unwitnessed workout was only half a workout. He skipped with the rope singing. He shadow-boxed in front of the mirrors with the seriousness of a man being watched by history. On the pads he was genuinely beautiful — the combinations arrived in weather patterns, a flurry and then the one clean thunderclap at the end of it — and the young pros along the wall watched with the frank envy of apprentices who would have given a finger for his timing and said so. Barlow watched too, when Barlow watched, and what the old coach watched was not the thunder. He watched the spaces between it: the chin riding a fraction high, the feet crossing on the retreat that Dane never bothered to make, the whole gorgeous downhill architecture of a fighter who had never once been made to think about what came back.
"You're admiring the umbrella shop again, Frank," Dane said once, catching the look, towelling off, delighted with himself.
"I'm admiring how dry you think you'll stay," Barlow said, and went back to his ledger, and the exchange joined the stock of club folklore, retold with the moral assigned differently depending on who was telling it.
The entourage was small but devoted: a cousin who carried the bag, a friend from school who ran the fan accounts and answered strangers' insults at two in the morning as if they had been addressed to him personally, a sponsor's man who appeared whenever a camera did, like a creature drawn to a particular frequency. They laughed at Dane's jokes in formation. They agreed with his forecasts in formation. A man can live a long time inside a formation like that, hearing the world only in the echo arrangement, and Dane had lived inside it long enough that the silence beyond it — the corridor at night, the office radio, the woman with the bucket — had stopped registering as part of the same building.
On Tuesday the club announced the open workout. It was Rick's idea, and it was a good one, which was why Rick earned his percentage: six weeks out from the regional card, with the billboard up and tickets moving but not moving fast enough, Dane would open his Friday session to the press and the public. Cameras in the club. Kids from the youth programme along the wall. The local television station, Tessa Okonkwo from the regional paper, a couple of podcast boys with more equipment than questions. Dane would hit pads, skip, shadow, sweat photogenically, and finish by predicting the round — the real card, the real finish — and the papers would print it, and the future would once again be invited to agree with him.
"You'll love it," Rick told him, walking him through the plan in the office while Diane Kowalski, who owned the club and therefore owned the consequences, listened from behind her desk with the face of a woman pricing a storm. "Full house. Your house. We let them see the weather being made."
"Friday," Dane said. "What time?"
"Six. Peak. We want the evening shows."
He trained that afternoon like a man signing autographs with his gloves. A regional television producer had sent questions in advance, and Dane answered them between rounds without sitting down, breathing easy, picking his phrases the way he picked his punches — the short ones, the ones that travelled. Asked what the club meant to him, he gestured at the ring, the bags, the poster of himself by the doors, and said Northgate had made him, which was true, and that he intended to put it on the map, which the assembled staff received in silence, the map in question having had Port Ellery on it for some decades. Asked about the night staff, the cleaning crew, the people who kept the house — he was not. Nobody asked. It would not have occurred to the questions, any more than it occurred to the weather to thank the ground.