Diane, who had run Northgate for nineteen years and could smell an insurance problem through a closed door, said, "Six is when the night staff come on. We'll keep the corridor clear, and the floor gets mopped after, not before — I don't want cameras slipping on a wet mat in my house." She made a note. "Greta comes in at six. I'll tell her to hold the floor until you're done, and work the offices first."
"Greta," Dane said, tasting the name like a man trying to place a flavour. "Right. The towel lady."
"She has worked here three years," Diane said, mildly, "and the towels are folded the way the laundry sends them." She closed her notebook. "Friday, six o'clock. Try to be the version of yourself the kids can use."
The posters went up. The youth programme kids put their names down in a rush. Tessa Okonkwo confirmed, and the television station confirmed, and by Thursday the club had the humming, over-lit feeling of a place about to be looked at, which is a feeling fighters know in their stomachs and buildings know in their walls.
Dane trained Thursday as if the week were already his. He put a sparring partner on the canvas in the second round — a pull counter, clean, nothing spiteful in it — and stood over the count with his gloves on his hips, and told the room, "Second round. I keep telling you people," and the room laughed, and somebody filmed that too, and by Friday morning the forecast had eight thousand views and the comments were full of thunder emojis and strangers saying The Weather never lies.
On Friday the sky over Port Ellery did something grey and uncommitted, and the ferries ran on time, and at five o'clock the club began to fill with the particular crowd an open workout draws: true believers, parents, journalists, boys with their fathers' old gloves over their shoulders. And at six, through the side door, with her own key, carrying her bucket, Greta Lindqvist came in to work — into a building that had rearranged itself around a forecast, on the one night of the year when the corridor was full of cameras and the floor was wanted dry, bright, and famous.
By six the club was full, and full in the wrong way for a woman with a mop.
Greta had been told to hold the training floor and work the offices first, and she had, and the offices were done by half past, and the changing rooms by seven, and by then the evening had developed a problem that nobody had thought to forecast. Two hundred people generate their own weather. The entrance hall floor was tracked with the grey rain off the street, the corridor was a river of mud in boot-print, and a boy from the youth programme had knocked a whole bottle of something orange and athletic across the edge of the ring apron, where it sat spreading, sticky, in the television lights.
Diane found her by the staff cupboard. "I know," she said. "I know I said hold the floor. The doorway's a swamp and the apron's worse, and if a camera slips on either I own it. Can you take the worst off the edges — just the edges, Greta — and stay out of the ring's way?"
"Edges," Greta said. "I can do edges."
So she filled her bucket, as she had filled it a thousand nights, with the water at the temperature her hands preferred and the measure of solution she could judge by smell, and she carried it through the service door with her mop, and she set it down by the ring apron, out of the traffic, in the lee of the ring steps where a bucket sensibly belongs.
The crowd, up close, was the usual coalition: fathers filming over sons' heads, mothers with the youth programme's leaflet folded in a pocket, two old men who had boxed out of this building when it still smelled of fish and who were conducting, at ringside volume, a forty-year-old argument about a fight neither could prove had happened. The television crew had taped their cables down and built their small bright altar by the steps. Tessa Okonkwo stood where journalists stand, at the angle that sees the ring and the room in one glance, notebook ready, and if she noticed the cleaner at the apron at all it was the way one notices a lighthouse — as part of the fixed furniture of the coast, there every night, unremarked because it had never once failed to be there. The open workout was in full voice by then. Dane was on the pads in the ring, and the sound of it — that double crack, glove on leather, like a door closing in a house where an argument is going well — carried over the music and the crowd noise, and the crowd made the other sound, the rising one, each time a combination finished somewhere dramatic.