.
quietly in the corner. I wondered if you noticed me. You waited your turn like everyone else, but were never chosen to spar.
Different strands of different pecking orders, I wondered. You were nobody here, so you were somebody there.
One day you saw me, and I flinched. I was between rounds, peeking out of the corridor of heavy bags at you. You smiled and flapped your arms like a bird, giggling to yourself. People turned to see who you were gesturing at, and all they saw was me, the chubby person, trying to get in shape. Someone shook their head at you, which made you drop your grin.
You kept looking at me, and gestured to the ring.
The day we spar, I leave work early for a meeting that doesn’t exist. I go for a run around the harbourside, and then a jog to the gym. Outside, I wrap myself.
I loop the wrap over my thumb and then immediately across the back of my hand. It goes over my hand three times, tight, and then around my wrist, three times, tight. There’s a ritual to this. I bring the wrap up from my wrist in between my little and ring finger, and then back down to my wrist. Up again, between ring and middle, and back down. Up again, between middle and index, and then back down. Each time, the wrap forms an X across the back of my hand. I loop it between thumb and index and then across the palm of my hand, to lock it in. I wrap the remainder of the cloth around my wrist, and then Velcro it shut. I flex my hand, open and closed.
You’re in the changing room when I enter. You’re talking on the phone, to a colleague about something to do with your work. I look you directly in the eye, the entire time I’m in the changing room. You barely notice me till I walk into the gym.
I face you in the room, both in our corners. Everyone has left except people coming in for a class. We’re nobodies in the ecosystem of this gym.
I stare into your eyes. I’ve obsessed about every second of this fight. I know how to dodge your arms. I know how to move backwards quickly. I have worked out every scenario in my head.
You made me do this. Maybe this was your plan all along. You flap wings at me. The bell rings. I drop my chin, hold up my fists, and breathe.
August
‘IS THAT THE BRAND-NEW iPad?’ Heath was up to his shoulders in the hot tub, one dry arm resting on the side, finger on a screen that was tiled with images of Cat. He had his back to Izzy, but could tell by her tone that she would be twisting the hem of whatever ridiculous garment she was wearing. ‘It’s just, if you drop it in the water, that’s the third one this year.’
‘I paid for it,’ he said through a rigid jaw, ‘and if I do drop it, which I won’t, I’ll pay for a new one.’
‘It’s just, it’s the waste?’
Heath reached for another bottle, the eye tattoo winking with the flex of his bicep, and uncapped it with his teeth. Four beers down and it was still too early to tell whether drinking would make him relax around Izzy or stoke his irritation with her. Either way, he was too busy to be interrupted: on the Instagram phase of his nightly cycle through Cat’s social media accounts. He’d already done Twitter and Facebook, and after Instagram, would have to work his way through what he thought of as the associated accounts, the people she called her friends, and the ‘man’ she called her husband. The associated accounts were in some ways more revealing than Cat’s own, as a friend might catch her dropping her guard, exposing the misery behind her heavily filtered life. When it happened, he could go to her. She could only pretend for so long, even to herself, to be totally jazzed about this life Ed had given her, this life of farmers’ markets, group holidays in Provençal gîtes, charity fundraisers, and strawberries and cream at Centre Court, and fucking golfing holidays.
It was a low-activity evening: Cat had liked a couple of things but hadn’t posted herself. If he was lucky he’d only have to go through the cycle once and he’d be done in under two hours.
‘Oh, why d’you have to—’ began Izzy, but the tablet pinged with a notification, and this time Heath snatched it away from her outstretched hand. A new post, a touching attempt at an arty selfie. She was in the garden, aureole around silhouette on the back wall of the Grange, the tumbling violet moor an invitation, an unmade bed laid out behind her. Heath felt the usual sick stirring deep under his belly. He shifted position, hiding himself under the bubbles in case Izzy thought it was for her, then returned to his study of Cat. Why had she kept her face in shadow? Had she been crying? Tears made most women ugly, but when Cat cried her face bloomed pink and white.
Izzy stopped mouth-breathing on the back of Heath’s neck and appeared in front of him. Christ, she was all done up for seduction. Her hair described the barrel of a curling tong, and she was dressed in an awful chiffon kimono thing she called cruise wear. It was supposed to be floaty and seductive, but it was covered in sequins and getting close to her felt like pressing up against a rose bush.
Another ping. Ed had just made his annual Instagram post. Heath was on it in seconds. It seemed that Ed was doing a life-drawing class in the Scottish borders as part of a stag weekend. The charcoal sketch was crap and the woman they were drawing wasn’t even attractive.
It meant, though, that Cat was on her own at the Grange for the first time in ages. He could be there in forty minutes. Pulse hammering, he got out of the tub just as Izzy sank into the bubbles.
‘You can have it to yerself,’ he said, heaving himself over the edge. He dried himself roughly on a towel, pulled on a tracksuit, took a bottle of Laurent Perrier from the drinks fridge, wrapped it in a towel, and threw it into his sports bag.
‘Where are you going? It’s nearly nine o’clock.’
‘Gym,’ he said. Izzy looked at the green bottles lined up on the edge of the hot tub, but she had learned, at last, not to challenge him.
His feet found their path in the divots and tufts they’d walked for as long as he could remember. He could’ve run the route from the Heights to the Grange in ten minutes, but he didn’t want the champagne to fizz, and anyway, he needed to clear his head and think about how he would say it. Below and to the west was the first estate he’d ever built, shoebox houses whose tiny gardens were mocked by the moor. In front of him, the dipping midsummer sun made a thin gold thread on the horizon. A single dazzling bead shone through a hole in the rocky crag that marked the midpoint between her house and his. He’d kissed her for the first time at the foot of those rocks, when they were both fourteen, kissed her, and that was as far as it had gone, the wanting getting worse over the years, and the conversation grinding in ever-decreasing circles. It had taken him years to realise they were all excuses.
‘Foster siblings still count,’ she’d said at first.
‘Don’t be daft. There’s no law against it.’
‘In the eyes of society, though.’ Since when did she care about society? Though they’d been raised under the same roof, she was not his sister; he was her possessor, not her protector, and they both knew it. Whatever they had, it was something thicker than blood.
Then, as they got older: ‘It would destroy our friendship, Heath, can’t you see that?’
‘Let it!’ he’d roared. ‘Let it … smash this misshapen thing and put it back together a new way, the right way.’
Her head had gone into her hands. ‘Will you listen to yourself? Smashing, misshapen. You’re so bloody intense. It was all right when we were kids, but you can’t want to carry on like this for ever.’
It was all he did want. He couldn’t remember a time he