Dear Sera

DEAR SERA [The kitchen in County Clare. The same pine table, the same scarring in the boards. The clock above the range says ten past four in the morning. One lamp on. The window over the sink is black; the lower paddock is out there somewhere, and so are the sheep, and so is the wall, and none of them can be seen. BRÍD Ó'SÚILLEABHÁIN is in the cardigan again. Under it, at the right shoulder, the edge of two colours of kinesiology tape. She writes slowly. She has the right forearm laid flat along the table to do it, so the shoulder does not have to hold the arm up, and every so often she stops, and puts the biro down, and rolls the shoulder once, and picks the biro back up. There is a mug of tea at her left hand. It went cold some time ago. There is no first draft in the bin this time. This is the only one.] ———————————————— Dear Sera, I'd guess you do not get many letters. I'd guess you will file this one under something. Go on, so. I'd only ask you to read it the once before you do, the way you said first viewings are for watching. I said my piece in the corridor. I'll not say it again. Once is advice. Twice is a sermon, and I have sat through enough of those in my life to know nobody listens to the second one. So this is about something else. ———————————————— Ignition. You'll have it on film. You'll have watched it more often than I have, I'd say, and I have watched it more often than is good for me. I had fought once already that night. I had stitches above the eye and butterfly closures on top of the stitches. You opened the cut early with an elbow, on purpose, which was correct, and I have never held it against you, because I would have done the same to you if I could have reached you. You put me in an Americana on the left arm. When I would not give you the arm you walked your hips round and turned it into the bar without ever letting go of it, and I have seen perhaps four people do that properly in fifteen years, and two of them are dead. I tapped. I have told people since that I chose the career over the pride. Reginald Graves said it on the night and called it the correct outcome, and I let that stand, because it was true. It was not the whole of it, though. You like the whole of things, so here it is. I lay there with my arm going the wrong way and I thought: she is better than me tonight. And I was relieved. I was relieved to be let stop. I had been doing this for fifteen years and I had never once been the woman in the last room before the last room, and I had decided a long time before that night that I was never going to be, and here was a younger woman putting a full stop on it for me, and I was grateful to her. I'd not have said that to a living soul in May. I'm saying it to you because you'll want it accurate, and because you'll use it, and I have decided I would rather you used the true one. On the way out I put my hand on your shoulder. You nodded. I meant: well done. I also meant: well, that's that, then. It wasn't. ———————————————— Here is the bit I sat down at four in the morning to write. Since I put in writing that I want this championship, three women have read it. Lacey Drummond would not touch it. She'll not even admit she read it. She lost. Kira Volkov read it and turned it into a clock. She told the whole federation she only had to still be there at the twelfth minute. I took her clock off her and used it back. She lost. And you stood in front of me with my blood in my eyebrow and told me you had read it twice, with notes, and you would be using it. Everybody treats it like a wound. Like I took off a bandage in public and now the three of you are deciding whether it would be decent to press on it. I have had a month to think about that, and I have decided what I'm doing with it. Nothing. I am not going to manage it. I am not going to budget it, or hide it, or ration it out across the rounds the way I told Saoirse to ration herself against Lacey. I am going to bring the whole of it into that cage the way it is and you are welcome to every bit of it. Read all you like. Make notes. Here is the thing I know that you don't, and it's the only thing I know that you don't, so I'm giving it to you as well. A want you gave up at twenty-five and found again at thirty-eight has no bottom to it. It is not a tell. It doesn't show up three seconds in advance in the hips. It is not going to be produced at twelve minutes forty and then run out, the way the useful part of a match runs out. I have felt everything else in me run out, Sera, I've felt the knees go and the lungs go and the second half of my career go and I've felt the first span go off like milk. This hasn't. It's the only thing I've got that doesn't. Use it. I'd be interested to see how. ———————————————— Two more things, because you'll want them and because I'd rather you had them from me. The first is mine. You'll have seen the tape on my right shoulder in that gym in Dublin. That's from Volkov, getting out of her hold. It's the right. You'd have found it inside a minute anyway, and Lacey would call me a fool for writing it down, and she'd be right, and I'm writing it down. The second is yours. You wrote down your ribs. Left side. The soft tissue, the rotation under load, the honest number instead of the applicable one. I read that too. I'll not pretend I didn't, and I'll not pretend I won't go there on Saturday. That's not me being hard. That's me taking you at your word, which is the only kind of respect I have ever seen you ask anybody for. ———————————————— There's a girl going to come into a gym in Dublin the night after this and ask me a question, and I have promised her an answer, either way. So whichever one of us walks out of there with it, I'll not be hanging about the building afterwards. I have somewhere to be. I've not been able to say that in a long time. ———————————————— I don't know what I'll be if I win it. I have not let myself get that far. I know what I'll be if I lose. I've been her for fifteen years. She's grand. She's fine. She gets up off the mat left arm first and goes back to work, and there are worse things to be, and I've no complaint against her. I would like, once, to find out who the other one is. See you Saturday. Bríd P.S. You needn't reply. I know you won't. You'll do it on Saturday, which is the right place for it. ———————————————— [She reads it through once. She does not change anything. She folds it in three, and puts it in an envelope, and on the front, in the same biro, she writes: SERA VOSS — WOMEN'S CHAMPION — c/o THE FOUNDRY. Then she looks at the middle two words for a moment, as though she is going to cross them out, and doesn't. She stands up, left arm first. She rinses the cold tea down the sink. The window is beginning to go grey. Out in the lower paddock, six sheep and a stone wall come up out of the dark, one at a time. She watches them do it for a long moment. Then she goes to put the kettle on.]