He was, she allowed, good to look at in the way weather is good to look at: from shelter, with no stake in the harvest. Very fast. Faster than the boys she saw on the late-night cards, faster around the shoulders than most, and she noticed — the way you notice a misspelling without deciding to read — that everything he did ran in one direction. Forward. Downhill. All his weather blew one way. A fighter like that, the old grammar said, in the back of her head where she did not go, is a beautiful thing until the ground changes under him.
She mopped the apron edge. She mopped the doorway swamp into respectability. She worked along the ring steps with the cloth for the orange spill, and nobody looked at her, which was the usual arrangement, and the one she preferred.
The pad work, before it ended, went on for twenty minutes, and Greta saw more of it than she intended to. A mop gives a person a reason to stand still without being idle, and the edges of the floor were, by Diane's decree, hers, and so she was standing still at the apron's edge while Dane worked through his set pieces for the cameras. He called two of them in advance — called them out loud, for the microphones, the round of the real fight in which he intended to produce them — and each time the room applauded the prophecy as much as the punches. The youth programme kids along the wall were beside themselves. A boy of perhaps twelve, with his father's old gloves laced over his shoulders like a yoke, watched Dane's feet with his whole body leaning, and Greta, who had mopped around three years of such boys, felt the small familiar tug of it: this is the use of champions, the true one, that they make the watching children stand taller in their own skins.
It was not his fault, she thought, with the fairness that had always been both her discipline and her defence, that nobody had yet taught him the second half of the trade. It was only his fault that he had stopped suspecting there was one.
Then the pad work ended, and the evening moved into its final act: the interview, in the ring, with the television camera and Tessa Okonkwo's recorder and the crowd pressed close and quiet in the way crowds go when a famous man is about to say the future out loud. Dane took the microphone with his gloves still on, sweat shining on him, breathing like a man who has arranged to be admired by it, and Rick at the ropes fed him the question like a cornerman feeding a stool.
"Six weeks out, Dane. The people want to know. What does The Weather say?"
He smiled into the lens. And at that moment — the precise moment the red light steadied and the room leaned in — a runner from the television crew, backwards-walking with a cable, opened a gap in the crowd along the ring steps, and Dane, who wanted a better angle and a bigger entrance to his own sentence, came down out of the ring the quick way, over the side by the steps, mid-stride, mid-performance, into the narrow strip of floor where an old woman stood with a mop.
He did not stop. Men like Dane, at that pitch of being looked at, do not have a gear for stopping; he came through the space she was standing in as if the space had been promised to contain nobody, and his shoulder — the lead shoulder, the downhill shoulder, a professional striking man's shoulder moving at interview speed with a television audience inside it — caught her high on the arm and turned her.
The bucket went over. It went over with the full, slow, dreadful commitment of a thing with water in it, ten litres describing a grey fan across the edge of the training floor, and the bucket itself clanged once on the concrete and rolled, and somewhere in the crowd a woman said oh, sharply, the way you do when a stranger falls in the street.