There were nine women in the class by spring, and they were not, for the most part, young. There was a harbour pilot of forty-six who wanted her balance back after an injury. There were two nurses from the night ward, sisters, who came straight from their shift and learned the shoulder roll with their eyes half closed and their hands, to Greta's quiet approval, already steady. There was a retired schoolteacher of sixty-one who had been the first to enrol and the slowest to stop apologising for taking up space, and whom Greta had cured of the apology by the simple method of never once acknowledging it: the room was hers by enrolment, the mat was hers by standing on it, and in six weeks the teacher was holding the centre of the small room like a woman who had graded ten thousand essays and was done being interrupted. They learned what Greta had to teach, which was not, in the end, very much about punching. Stance first. Distance always. The guard as a home you carried with you. How to leave a place that was going bad — a clinch, a corridor, a conversation — with your feet under you and your dignity unconsulted by panic. "You are not learning to fight," she told them, the first morning and every few mornings after, in the tone of a woman explaining a tide table. "You are learning where you are standing. Fighting is only where you are standing, with consequences."
Freya joined in the second month. She arrived at six-fifty on a Tuesday with a kit bag she had clearly bought for the occasion — the tags, her mother noted, still on it — and stood in the doorway of the training room doing the thing she had watched applicants do at the scholarship evaluations of the ferry company: deciding whether she was permitted to be a beginner in public. "I dispatch ferries," she said. "I don't — " "Today you are a student," said Greta, and handed her the spare wraps, plain ones, and showed her how to wind them, knuckle by knuckle, standing close in the harbour light, a mother dressing her grown daughter's hands for the trade she had hidden from her for twenty-eight years. It was slowly done and neither of them hurried it and neither of them said the large thing that was present in the room, because the large thing had been said, in its own way, in a changing room in October, and what was left was this: the winding, the learning, the daughter's hands in the mother's, acquiring a grammar. Freya was, it turned out, a natural at exactly one thing, the thing her mother valued above all others. She did not fall down. Her footwork was earnest and her jab was a work of administrative fiction, but put her in the centre of the small room and push the lesson at her from any side and she gave ground like a harbour wall gives it, an inch at a time, at full price, and stayed. "There it is," Greta said once, watching, dry as paper, to the room at large. "Genetics."
Dane Whitaker trained at the other end of the morning now. He had moved his defence work with Barlow to the early sessions, before the entourages and the cameras woke, and the club had grown used to the sight of its star doing the least glamorous work in the building: rounds of nothing but slipping, rolling, catching punches on the high guard, his whole spectacular offence locked in its case like a violin. Barlow coached him with an economy that bordered on affection. "Again," was most of it. "Slower," was the rest. The regional card had come and gone in the winter; Dane had won it, on points, in a fight the reporters called mature so often that the word attached itself to him for good, and when a journalist at the press table — a new one, who had not done the reading — asked him for his prediction for the rematch clause, Dane Whitaker had smiled the smile of a man setting down a piece of luggage he had carried a long way. "I don't predict anymore," he said. "I train. It turns out there's more time for it." Tessa Okonkwo, who had done the reading, wrote the sentence down whole, and it ran in the regional paper under her byline, and Rick Sorensen had it framed, eventually, for his own office — not the shove, not the knockdown, not the verdict. The sentence. A manager's education, framed in plain black wood.