The Second

THE SECOND [The converted warehouse off the Lower Glanmire Road, Cork. Tuesday morning. The ring, the heavy bag, the stack of crash mats against the far wall with the one new mat in it that is a different colour and that nobody has mentioned. SAOIRSE FALLON is sitting on the apron with her boots off and her phone in her hand. She is reading something. She has been reading it for a while. MICK WALSH comes in from the yard with two coffees and puts one down beside her. She doesn't look up.] MICK: Ye're not training. SAOIRSE: I'm reading. MICK: I can see that. I'm saying ye're not training. SAOIRSE: Bríd wrote a letter to Sera Voss. MICK: Did she. SAOIRSE: She put me in it. [She turns the phone round and holds it out. Mick doesn't take it. He's never taken a phone off anybody in his life.] MICK: Read me the bit. SAOIRSE: "There's a girl going to come into a gym in Dublin the night after this and ask me a question." MICK: A girl. SAOIRSE: A girl. I'm twenty-four, Mick. MICK: Ye're a girl to her. Ye'll be a girl to her when ye're forty. SAOIRSE: I know. [She looks at the screen a second longer. Then she locks it and puts it face down on the apron.] SAOIRSE: She said she has somewhere to be. After. Said she's not been able to say that in a long time. MICK: And the somewhere's you. SAOIRSE: The somewhere's a gym with a broken radiator. I just happen to be in it. ———————————————— [She pulls her boots over and starts lacing them. Mick sits down on the apron beside her, which costs him something in the knees, and drinks his coffee.] MICK: Adeyemi. SAOIRSE: Adeyemi. MICK: Ye've watched it. SAOIRSE: Everybody's watched it, Mick. Three million people have watched it. MICK: I'm not asking about three million people. SAOIRSE: I've watched it. [She finishes the left boot. Starts the right.] SAOIRSE: She's the best I've ever seen at it. I'm not saying that to be nice and I'm not saying it so I look humble when I beat her. She is. There's a corkscrew forty-eight seconds into that package where she goes up meaning one thing and lands doing another. She changes her mind in the air. I can't do that. I've never been able to do that. Nobody I trained with in Puerto Rico could do that. MICK: So she's better than ye. SAOIRSE: In the air she's better than me. MICK: And on the rope? [She stops lacing. Looks at him.] SAOIRSE: Go on, then. Ye've a point. Make it. MICK: I've no point. I'm asking. SAOIRSE: Ye've never once asked me anything ye didn't already know the answer to. MICK: Then answer it and we'll see if I was right. ———————————————— [She stands. Walks to the near corner. Puts her hand on the top turnbuckle and leaves it there.] SAOIRSE: She thinks in the air. I think on the rope. That's all it is. That's the whole fight. She commits first and then she works out what she's doing on the way down, and she's so good at the working-out that it's never mattered. It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing in this whole company and I mean that. But it means every decision she makes, she makes it already falling. Already gone. There's no taking it back once her feet are off the rope, there's only adjusting. I used to be the same. Ye know I was. I used to say the pause was the thing that would get me killed. MICK: Ye did. SAOIRSE: And then Voss took my arm apart and I lay in a room for two months and I found out it's the other way round. The pause is the only thing up there that's mine. Everything after my feet leave is gravity's. The one second at the top before I go — that's the only second in the whole move where I'm still deciding. She's never had that second. I've watched every frame of her there is, Mick, and she doesn't stop at the top. Once. Against Al-Nasir, down in corner one, she looked at the floor. Everybody saw it. The camera saw it. And then she went up anyway. That's not the second. The second's when ye look and it's still yours to decide. She looked like somebody reading a sentence she'd already written. MICK: Ye'll be looking at her while she's not looking at you. SAOIRSE: I'll be on the rope with a second in my pocket, and she'll be in the air spending hers. And she'll spend it brilliantly. And it'll be gone. [Beat.] SAOIRSE: That's not a plan to beat her. That's just what happens when two of us go up and only one of us looks. ———————————————— [She climbs. Fast — the same speed as ever, the one thing about her nobody has managed to change. She sets her feet on the top turnbuckle and looks down at the mats. She pauses. One second. Mick watches it the way he always watches it now: not at all, very carefully. She doesn't go. She sits down on the top turnbuckle instead, feet on the second rope, elbows on her knees, and looks out at the empty warehouse.] MICK: Ye were going. SAOIRSE: I was looking. MICK: Ye looked and ye didn't go. SAOIRSE: That's allowed too. That's half of what the second's for. ———————————————— MICK: Dublin. SAOIRSE: What about it. MICK: Ye went up there and told her ye'd not take fifteen years. SAOIRSE: I did. MICK: And ye didn't say a name. SAOIRSE: No. MICK: Have ye got one? [She doesn't answer straight away. Down on the apron Mick has set the coffee down, the way he does when he's decided something matters.] SAOIRSE: The rule says ye ask out loud. In the building. With a name in it. I'm not saying it here because here's not the building and you're not the person. MICK: I'm not asking ye to say it. I'm asking have ye got one. SAOIRSE: I've got a job. Not a name yet. I'll have the name on Saturday night. MICK: How? SAOIRSE: Because on Saturday night, at the end of the show, there'll be somebody holding that belt. And I'm going to walk into the cage and ask whoever it is. [Mick looks at her for a long moment.] MICK: And if it's her? [Nothing. The warehouse is very quiet. Somewhere outside a lorry goes past on the Lower Glanmire Road and the corrugated wall hums with it and stops. Saoirse Fallon sits on the top turnbuckle and looks at the stack of mats, the old ones and the one new one. She is completely still. It is a good deal longer than one second.] SAOIRSE: Then it's her. MICK: She's the one gave ye the — SAOIRSE: I know what she gave me, Mick. I'm the one she gave it to. She told me herself, in that gym, before any of this. The body's a partner and it doesn't make the decision. Ye have to do the rest of the work yourself. She's spent fifteen years doing the work and handing the belts to people who needed them more. She told the whole world she's done with that. If she walks out of there holding it and I don't ask her for it — out of what? Manners? Gratitude? — then I've taken the one thing she's ever told me straight and I've thrown it back at her and called it respect. She'd never forgive me. And she'd be right. [She stands up on the turnbuckle. Sets her feet.] SAOIRSE: And if it's Voss, it's Voss. She took my arm off me once. She can try again. MICK: Either way. SAOIRSE: Either way. ———————————————— [She looks down at the mats. The pause again — one second, no more, the size it's supposed to be.] SAOIRSE: Adeyemi first. Saturday's Saturday. Talk me through it. MICK: I'm not talking ye through anything, girl, ye know it better than I do. SAOIRSE: Talk me through it anyway. MICK: Off the top. Ye look. Ye go. And whatever she's doing when ye get there, ye were already ready for it, because ye saw it a second before she did. SAOIRSE: Aye, boy. [She goes. Hy-Brasil, the full rotation, into the mats. The landing is clean. She rolls, and comes up, and is already facing the corner she came from. Mick picks his coffee back up. It's gone cold. He drinks it anyway.] MICK: Again. [The scene ends with her climbing.]