Now he was on the other side of the mat, and the open house had arranged itself around the two of them in a wide, curious ring, and Dee could feel the peculiar attention of a room that thinks it already knows how a story goes. Blake Rennert was twenty-seven years old and the regional middleweight champion, and he wore his athleticism the way other men wore a good suit, constantly and with the faint expectation of comment. He had come onto the mat in a black rashguard with his name across the back in letters the colour of fresh money, and shorts, and bare feet that slapped the mat in small, showy rhythms while he warmed up inside the demonstration itself, bouncing, rolling his shoulders, shaking out his wrists, grinning at the ring of faces. He had a following. There were young men along the wall in Copperline t-shirts who had plainly come to see him the way people go to see a well-known dog do a trick it has done a hundred times, and two of them were already filming on their phones before Sam had said a word, holding the phones up at the hopeful angle of men who expect history to be short and shareable.
"All right," Sam said. He stood between them in his grey referee's shirt, fifty years old and built like a wardrobe, with a whistle he did not intend to use and a hand towel over one forearm. "You all heard the terms at the desk. I'll say them again because saying things twice is most of my job. This is a technical demonstration. Standing start. No strikes. No slams. Controlled to the ground or I stop it. A tap ends it. A word ends it. My hand ends it. Nobody is winning anything tonight except maybe a little education, and education is free, so settle down." A small laugh went around the ring. "Dee. Blake. Shake, if you're willing."
Dee stepped forward and put out her hand. Blake took it with a flourish, turned it, patted the back of it twice with his other hand in the manner of a man congratulating a child on a drawing, and winked at the phones.
"Don't worry," he said, just loudly enough. "I'll go easy on the help."
A few people laughed. Not many, and not for long, but a few, and Dee heard Jenna Park, somewhere behind her at the edge of the mat, make a sound in her throat that she had heard Jenna make at weigh-ins, a sound that meant Jenna was deciding whether a remark was worth the trouble it would cause. Dee let go of Blake's hand. Her own hand was steady. She had cleaned the changing rooms that morning. She had unblocked the drain in the men's showers on Wednesday with a tool like a small metal snake and a bucket and no help, and she had carried two crates of bottled water up from the delivery bay, and she had trained, once, a long time ago, in halls in three countries, in a white uniform not unlike the borrowed one she was wearing now, before judges with flags, and none of that history was visible on her, she knew. What was visible was a woman of forty-eight in a borrowed gi top with her dark hair braided back, her sleeves pushed carefully to the elbow and then, thinking better of it, pulled carefully down again. She looked, she was aware, exactly like someone the room had already finished understanding.
Yusuf sat in the second row with his hands folded over the head of his cane. He was not coaching. He had told her that morning that he would not coach, that coaching a demonstration was like shouting instructions at weather. He caught her eye now and did nothing at all with his face, which from Yusuf was a considerable statement, and she breathed out once, slowly, through her nose, and felt her shoulders come down where they belonged.
"Positions," Sam said.
They took their marks on the taped lines. The mat smelled of the disinfectant she herself used, the lemon one Simon bought in bulk and which she had privately decided, years ago, smelled less like lemons than like a rumour of lemons, and under that the warmer smell of canvas and other people's effort. She could hear the air conditioning. She could hear the toddler on the man's shoulders kicking happily against nothing. She set her feet the way she had set them ten thousand times before Blake Rennert was born, weight even, knees soft, and she watched Blake's chest rather than his face, because faces lie for a living and chests have to tell the truth about where the weight is going.
Blake was still performing. He rolled his neck. He pointed at the two young men with the phones and then at himself, a small mime of put me in the picture, and they laughed and adjusted. He bounced twice on the balls of his feet, high, athletic, the bounce of a man whose game was built on being somewhere unexpected before anyone could object. Eddie Krol stood at the corner of the mat with a towel over his shoulder and his chin up, coaching already in the low, carrying voice that coaches use when they want the whole room to hear the coaching more than the fighter does.