What It Costs

[A storage room off the loading dock at The Foundry, an hour before doors. Concrete floor, a stack of folded steel chairs against one wall, a single work light. Bríd Ó'Súilleabháin sits on a road case, forearm guards off, slowly taping her left wrist. The swan inked on the forearm shows between passes of the wrap. She works without hurrying, and speaks like someone thinking out loud rather than performing.] BRÍD: Fifteen years, and I still tape this wrist the way a fella in Dublin showed me when I was two-and-twenty. He's gone now. Good man. He told me the tape doesn't stop the damage — it only tells the hand where to put it. [She tears the strip, smooths it flat with her thumb.] That's most of what I know, when you get down under it. You don't stop the damage. You decide where it goes. BRÍD: They've put Rancid across from me tonight, and I'll be fair to the man, because being fair to people is the one thing I've managed to keep clean in all this. So here's the fair version. Rancid is very, very good at what he does. There's nobody on this roster walks through that door more willing than him. He'll open himself up to beat you. He'll find the one thing in that room that was never meant to be picked up, and he'll pick it up, and he won't think twice. That isn't a flaw in him. That's the whole of him. He is exactly what he says he is. [She flexes the wrapped hand, checks it, starts on the right.] BRÍD: But here's the thing about a man with no line. He thinks the line is weakness — thinks I carry one because I haven't the stomach to set it down. He has it backwards. I've put more through that cage wall than Rancid's had hot dinners. I know to the inch what the room can do. And I drew my line after I learned what's on the far side of it. Not before. That's the difference between the two of us. He's never once had to decide. I decide every night I walk down. BRÍD: So he'll come with everything, and I'll meet him with everything, and somewhere in the thick of it he'll learn that fifteen years of knowing exactly what this costs is not the same as being afraid of it. [A short breath, not quite a laugh.] It's the opposite of that, son. [She pulls the forearm guards back on, sits a moment with both hands flat on her knees.] BRÍD: And after. After I'm done here tonight — I've a question to put to the office. Been carrying it a fortnight. It'll keep the length of one more fight. [She stands, rolls her neck once, lifts the work light off its hook, and the room goes dark behind her.]