Ask Me Again

ASK ME AGAIN ———————————————— Donlon's again. The bag room. Past ten again, which I am starting to think is the only hour anybody in this business is honest in. Saoirse Fallon came through the door while I was finishing on the heavy bag, the same as last time, and got herself a glass of water from the cooler, the same as last time, and sat down on the same bench. I do not believe she planned any of that. I noticed all of it. She has been away a good while. She looks well. She looks like somebody who has slept, which none of us do. I said: you're back, then. She said: I'm back. I said: they've given you a fight. She said: they have. And then she did the eight minutes of not starting, and I let her have them, because I have learned to wait and because I was in no hurry to get to whatever she had come for. ———————————————— What she eventually said was: I've been reading the thing you wrote about me. I told her it was not about her. I told her it was about the questions she asked, which is a different thing, and that if she reads it as being about her she will get less out of it. She said: you told me how to fight Lacey Drummond. I said: I did. She said: are you going to do what you told me? ———————————————— I want to set down what I said, the way I set down the last one, because I think I owe her the answer being accurate more than I owe myself the answer being flattering. What I said was this. No. I cannot. The advice was correct and it is still correct and I am not able to take it. I told you not to try and outwork her. I told you the Lacey across the cage from you is not the one you should be fighting — the one you should be fighting is the one who is still there in the second round, after you have spent forty per cent of yourself on the first one. I told you to conserve while she conserves. I told you she is patient in a way she has not noticed she is being patient, and that her face will tell you nothing and her body will tell you three seconds in advance, and you should spend those three seconds well. All of that was true. All of that is still true. It was advice for a twenty-four-year-old. Conserving is a thing you do when you have got something left to spend later. I am thirty-eight. I do not have a later. If I sit in the first ten minutes of that fight keeping something back for the last five, the last five will arrive and I will find that what I kept back went off in the meantime, the way milk does. I have got one span in me now and it is at the front. That is what fifteen years actually costs. Not the knees. Everybody expects the knees. What it costs is the second half. So no. I am going to have to do the thing I told you never to do, which is meet her early and try to finish it before the part of the match where she becomes the better fighter arrives. She said: that's not conserving, that's the opposite of conserving. I said: it is. Write that down too. She did not write it down. She looked at me for a bit. Then she said the thing. ———————————————— She said: are you all right, Bríd. Nobody has asked me that in about four years. There is a way people ask a thirty-eight-year-old fighter if she is all right that means should you be doing this, and I have got a face I make for that one. She was not asking that. She was asking the plain version. I told her the truth, because that is the arrangement we appear to have. I told her I am one fight away from a shot at the championship. That is the position. Whoever walks out of that cage gets Sera Voss, and Sera Voss beat me in the semi-final of the tournament on a night when I had already fought once, and I have thought about that match more than is useful, and I would like it back. I told her that is the closest I have ever been. Fifteen years. Three continents. Two retirements. Two comebacks. Every promotion I have worked has had a belt in it and I have been near several of them and I have never once been the person standing in the last room before the last room. And then I told her the part I have not said to anyone. I have spent eighteen months looking for the next thing worth being good at. You know that. I told you that sitting on this bench. I told you to ask me again in five years and I would either have found it or I would be doing this work when I should not be. It has not been five years. It has been months. And the question has stopped being academic, and it did not stop because my body gave out and it did not stop because somebody beat me. It stopped because they put a championship one door away from me, and I found out what I do when it is that close. I want it. Not the way I want a good night's sleep or a fight I am proud of. The other way. The way that wakes you at four and does not let you back down. I did not know that was still in there. I thought I had made my peace with being the one who does the work and lets the belts go to the people who need them, and I was wrong, and I have been walking around for days feeling like somebody who found a bottle in a cupboard they had told everyone they had emptied. That is not the after. That is more of the during. I do not know what to do with that yet. ———————————————— Saoirse said — and I am recording this exactly, because it landed harder than she will ever know she threw it — She said: you always tell me the body is a partner and it doesn't make the decision. You have to do the rest of the work yourself. I said: I do say that. She said: so do the rest of the work. Then she finished her water and said she had to go, because she has got a fight of her own on that card and she was not going to be the one who kept me up. She left the glass on the bench by the cooler again. ———————————————— A word about Lacey Drummond, since I have written about her twice now and she has never once written about me. I meant it when I said she is one of the ones who is good at this without having decided to be. There are not many of us. It is a strange, small club and nobody in it can explain the membership. She has just lost a championship and I watched her lose it and I watched her applaud the woman who took it off her, and she said aye, fair enough, you did say, and she meant it, and she has not asked for a rematch since. There is not one competitor in three continents who would have handled that as well as she did. I want that on the record from me, because it will not come from her — she does not talk about herself, she has a woman follow her round with a camera instead, which I do not understand and have stopped trying to. None of that is going to matter on the night. She is younger than me and she is fresh and she is the most dangerous fighter in this division that nobody has properly worked out yet, and I am thirty-eight with a wide grey streak I have never dyed and one span in me, and I am going to walk in there and use all of it in the first ten minutes and find out whether that is enough. Lacey — you will not read this. You do not read things. But if somebody tells you about it: I am not coming to have a war with you. I know what those cost and I have paid for a lot of them and I would not spend one on a woman I have got no quarrel with. I am coming to finish it early, because early is all I have got, and because there is a belt on the other side of you and I have found out this week that I want it more than I told anybody I did. Bring the good version. I would hate to get through on a night you were only half-there. ———————————————— Fifteen years and I have never once been this close. I have done the work the work asks of me and it has always been enough. It is not going to be enough this time. This time I have to want it as well, out loud, where people can hear me, which is not a thing I have ever been any good at. Saoirse — if you read this one too. Ask me again after. — B.