"Seven. What if that's the number that follows me. You know how it works. A man can win eleven more bouts, he can win a second title, he can retire clean and coach kids, and at his testimonial dinner some comedian—" He stopped, because the sentence had arrived somewhere true and he disliked the neighbourhood. "My grandfather was a boxer, did I ever tell you? Club fighter, El Paso. He lost a bout in the first round once, in nineteen sixty-something, to a man who wasn't fit to carry his bag, and that is the only sentence anybody in my family has ever said about his whole career. Thirty-one wins. One sentence. He carried that sentence to his grave like a stone in his shoe, Eddie. It was in the room when he died. My father mentioned it in the eulogy and called it funny."
Eddie was quiet a moment. "Your father is a fool about some things that matter," he said at last, "and I have told him so at a christening. Listen to me. The way not to be defined by seven seconds is not to spend six weeks building a machine to erase them, because a machine built out of panic loses to the first thing it meets that isn't in the plan, and a forty-eight-year-old judoka with a national medal is a plan made out of things that aren't in your plan. The way is to go and fight a proper bout against a proper opponent, under Sam Whitaker, with a doctor's signature, which is incidentally the bout your opponent has just spent three days insisting on, in writing, at the cost of considerable trouble to herself, most of which was not about you at all. I read her conditions. Have you?"
"Simon sent them."
"Have you read them."
"I read the first one."
"Read all four," Eddie said, "and then tell me again about her one trick. A woman whose trick is a single throw does not write condition four, Blake. There is no money in that condition for her. There's not even pride in it. I have coached men for money and men for pride for twenty years and I know the shape of both, and that list is neither. That list is a person telling you exactly who she is, in advance, for free, which is either the most generous thing an opponent has ever done for you or the most frightening, and I have not yet decided which, and neither, I suspect, have you."
So Blake read all four conditions that night, alone, in his apartment, with the highlight folder unopened on the same phone, and he read condition three twice, the one that forbade the club to use his picture with the words coward, fluke or fraud, the condition that protected him as carefully as it protected her, written in the same hand and the same ink, by the night janitor he had laughed at in front of a photographer. His manager called while he was reading, with a plan involving a mop in a promotional photograph described, three times, as ironic, and Blake listened to the whole plan in silence, and then said, "No. Contract says no," in a voice that surprised him with its steadiness, and put the phone down, and sat for a long time in the quiet of an apartment full of framed photographs of a man grinning at the peak of other men's worst half seconds, before he got up, without deciding to, and began, very slowly and with terrible concentration, to drill his falling. Not his attacks. His falling. The thing she had actually beaten was not his reach or his balance; everybody at the club, drilling against partners briefed to be her, could now stop the throw. She had beaten the half second in which he had believed falling was something that happened to other people, and he drilled his falling for an hour on the living-room rug, alone, badly at first and then less badly, a champion learning to land in an empty room where there was nobody to see it, which was, though he would not have had the words for it until much later, the first honest training he had done in years.
Across the river, in a second-floor flat above a laundromat, Dee was telling Carla about the contract review over the phone while folding work clothes, and Carla, who had inherited her mother's refusal to be impressed in the wrong places, listened to the whole account and then said, "You negotiated a pay review for five other people and a scholarship fund and a referee and a doctor, and for yourself you negotiated a rule being read aloud in a room. Mum. A rule. Read aloud."